EuroTower is a platform for automation in IT infrastructure using Ansible®, equipped with a central graphics console. It is a complete, stable and fully supported Enterprise-class solution for professional use in enterprises and organizations.
EuroTower provides a browser-based interface that facilitates automation management by offering all the necessary features and facilities that are missing from Ansible®. It greatly improves security standards, enables role-based access control, self-service, and stores event logs with advanced notification capabilities. EuroTower also provides CLI interface, REST API and integration with other applications such as: EuroIQ, ManageIQ® (including Continuous Discovery), EuroMan, Red Hat® Satellite, Splunk® and many more...
EuroTower, thanks to a clear graphics console, making it possible to see the current status of connected hosts and the history of operations filtered by organization, teams and particular roles, such as developer, auditor or team leader. In addition, EuroTower makes it possible to create advanced workflows that can be performed both in a static and a dynamically generated environments.
Implementing IT Automation with Ansible® gives the impression of time travel. However, it is only with the right interface that we can ‘leave the engine room to enjoy the view of the stars’ – that's what we created EuroTower for.
Key features of EuroTower
Graphical user interface
EuroTower provides transparent graphical user interface of NOC ( Network Operations Center) type to enhance the capabilities of the Ansible® automation engine. Thanks to it, the administrators can see what exactly is happening in a given environment. Very quickly, they can check the status of connected hosts or snapshots from recently completed tasks along with their result.
It is possible to customize how particular pieces of information and notifications are displayed in the console to suit individual needs, which further facilitates the management of the infrastructure and increases its readability.
Role-Based Access Control System
With RBAC (Role Based Access Control) system, it is possible to give each user or even entire teams the appropriate roles and permissions to access selected resources (playbooks, inventories, host information, etc.) and platform capabilities.
Advanced notifications
EuroTower provides integrated support for advanced notifications. They can be sent to individual recipients, teams, people in specific positions, or to the entire organization, through channels such as email, Slack, Webhook, Rocket.Chat, IRC, Grafana, Mattermost, PagerDuty , or Twilio. This makes it much easier to introduce a ChatOps collaboration model in your enterprise.
Real-time working status update
Playbooks in EuroTower run in real time. This allows the administrator to see what is happening to the hosts in Ansible® at any time. They can see which tasks on each machine are currently running, which have been successfully completed and which have failed, as well as where the error is due to. The administrator can also preview the task queue and schedule their execution.
Other types of tasks, such as source control updates or cloud inventory refreshes, appear in a common task view. Each task can run at any given time, or be scheduled to be run later, or can run continuously.
Easy connection to the cloud
EuroTower can automatically download resources from public cloud providers such as AWS™, Google Cloud Platform®, Microsoft Azure® , and OpenStack®. It also enables synchronization with a private cloud and a virtual environment. The list of environments with which EuroTower integrates is constantly being developed.
EuroTower vs. Ansible®
Dynamic Inventory
The ‘Dynamic Inventory’ function implemented in EuroTower makes it possible to automatically import inventory (hosts) from other centralizing platforms. Dynamic Inventory works by integrating with: Red Hat® Satellite 6, Red Hat® CloudForms®, EuroIQ, EuroMan and OpenStack®.
Credential Security
EuroTower uses the SSH protocol to connect to remote hosts. Before the key is passed to SSH, it is decrypted and then placed in a named pipe, so it will never be written to disk. EuroTower makes it possible to grant users and teams the ability to use Credentials without actually revealing passwords or keys. So if a user moves to a different team or leaves the organization, there is no need to change the credentials.
Push-Button Deployment
EuroTower provides easily configurable job templates that contain information about jobs, an inventory, variables, playbooks, options, and settings. Thus, it enables running multi-level and multi-stage provisioning, updates, settings or other broadly understood ‘setup’ of the environment, with a single button.
Centralized Logging and Auditing
EuroTower also provides a detailed history of task execution across all environments. For example, it is possible to see real-time information about jobs that are queued, scheduled, and currently being performed, along with details about templates, inventory, credentials, and settings. System and job tracking output can be exported from EuroTower directly to a selected endpoint such as Splunk, ElasticSearch, Sumo Logic® and many more.
Workflow Enhancements
EuroTower makes it possible to create advanced workflows that are performed both in a static environment and in a dynamically generated environment. Below are listed examples of these:
- the ability to override the inventory set during the workflow
- convergence nodes (waiting for the correct execution of other dependent steps)
- nesting smaller tasks to larger ones
- pausing and waiting for user approval.
How is EuroTower different from the AWX project™?
AWX™ is a project developed by the Open Source community. Within AWX™ software development takes place. EuroTower, on the other hand, is a fully supported solution with an extended lifecycle for professional corporate applications. It is created on the basis of selected AWX™ versions, which are adapted by our engineers for use in critical customer environments, e.g. by extending its basic capabilities and ensuring stability and business continuity.
EuroTower specifications
| Manufacturer | EuroLinux Sp. z o.o. |
| Based on | Ansible® AWX™ (Open Source) |
| Technologies included | Ansible®, Ruby, PostgreSQL |
| Alternative to | Ansible Tower® (Red Hat®), Ansible® AWX™ (community) |
| Interfaces | www, CLI, REST API |
| Release date | November 2020 |
Integration list
Integrations for EuroTower include a list of integrations available for Ansible®. Below are the most important ones.
See the Ansible® home page for a complete listing https://www.ansible.com/integrations
| Virtualization Management | VMware®, Red Hat® Virtualization (RHV), Xenserver®, Vagrant® |
| Cloud management | Amazon Web Services™ (AWS), Google Cloud Platform®, Microsoft Azure®, OpenStack® |
| Supported operating systems | Linux (RHEL®, EuroLinux, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, and others), Windows® Server, UNIX, IBM® (z/OS, Power Systems) |
| Data warehouse management | NetApp®, Infinidat®, Pure Storage®, IBM® Storage, Dell® EMC |
System requirements
- EuroLinux 7.7+ or equivalent system (CentOS, RHEL, Oracle® Linux, Scientific Linux)
- EuroLinux 8.2+ or equivalent (CentOS, RHEL, Oracle® Linux)
- Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome browser
- PostgreSQL version 10
- Ansible® version 2.8+.
Hardware requirements
- 2 CPU or 2 vCPU for small instances
- 4GB RAM for small instancese
- 80GB of disk storage for small instances.