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From Manual to Magic: Automating App Deployments with Ansible Tower

There was a time when deploying applications meant long checklists, careful coordination, and inevitable late nights. Every environment had slight differences, and the risk of “it works on my machine” loomed large.

Then came Ansible, and later, Ansible Tower—bringing structure, visibility, and automation to an otherwise fragile process.

In this post, I’ll share how I transformed application deployments from a manual, error-prone task to a fully automated and repeatable workflow using Ansible Tower.

🧱 The Manual Pain

Before automation, deploying apps like Tomcat or WebSphere involved:

This not only slowed things down but also left room for inconsistency, human error, and post-deployment firefighting.

🧰 Enter Ansible Tower

Ansible Tower is the web-based UI and API for Ansible. It allows for:

It builds on the simplicity of Ansible while making it collaboration-friendly and enterprise-ready.

⚙️ What I Automated

I wrote playbooks and job templates in Tower to handle:

Each component was modular and reusable. For example:

# handlers/main.yml
- name: restart tomcat
  systemd:
    name: tomcat
    state: restarted

🧪 Workflow Breakdown

  1. Trigger via Tower UI or API Developers or release engineers could trigger deployments without SSH access.

  2. Inventory-Driven Logic Hosts were grouped by environment (dev, stage, prod), so the same playbook adjusted behavior dynamically.

  3. Credential Isolation SSH keys and secrets were stored securely in Tower, not shared in scripts.

  4. Visual Logs and Job Outputs Tower provided real-time visibility—what task ran, where it failed, and who ran it.

🚀 The Impact

🧠 Lessons Learned