Short and sweet one this month as I’ve had quite a lot on my plate (buying a new house and made redundant at work due to COVID), so in between looking for jobs I’ve only been able to spin up a quick AWX instance but haven’t had time to dig into the config much as yet. This article is essentially just a quick and simple script to install and spin up an Ansible AWX instance on a CentOS 8 Stream box, and generate a self-signed certificate and strong credentials for secure config management.

I’ll put together a guide for client discovery and some proper automation workflows over the next few months, but for now this is it.

Carl Sagan If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. First thing’s first, and the first thing we’ll need here is a computer. For this build, you can use pretty much any hardware you have available as the initial resource is pretty light, but I’d recommend an AWS EC2 instance over a computer you have at home unless you have a server you can leave online 24/7, as uptime is what’s important for websites and AWS tends to have a pretty good record in that department.

Introduction For the tinkerers and hobbyists out there who are interested in tech, there’s often a limit to what you can test and experiment with on just a single computer at home. You may be limited by your operating system, or not want to potentially brick a computer you have your personal data on, or even need to test some network tool which requires a server and a client, or two servers, or 10 clients.