AWX is the open source, community supported upstream project for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, formerly known as Ansible Tower. It gives teams a web based interface, a full REST API, and a distributed task engine on top of Ansible, turning command line playbook runs into a managed, auditable automation service.

The project began at AnsibleWorks as the commercial Ansible Tower product, and after Red Hat acquired Ansible, it open sourced the codebase as AWX in September 2017, positioning it as the development ground where new features land before they are hardened into the supported Automation Platform controller. With AWX, you organize automation around projects (synced from Git or other source control), inventories (static or dynamically pulled from cloud providers), credentials (stored encrypted and injected at runtime), and job templates that tie a playbook to its inventory and credentials. On top of that, it adds role based access control, a visual dashboard, job scheduling, workflow chaining, webhooks, and real time job output, so multiple teams can run, track, and delegate automation without sharing SSH keys or sitting at a terminal.

Modern AWX runs on Kubernetes or OpenShift through the AWX Operator, which manages installation, upgrades, and scaling declaratively, reflecting its shift from a single host application to a cloud native, container based platform. Because it is the upstream of a paid product, AWX moves fast and ships frequently, which makes it ideal for labs, learning, and self managed deployments, though teams needing formal support and long term stability typically run the downstream Automation Platform instead.

AWX in Action