Red Hat Ansible Tower Life Cycle - RETIRED

Ansible Tower is End Of LIfe and as such please refer to the following page. Customers who are using Tower as a part of the Ansible Automation Platform should follow the life cycle documented here. If you are unsure which license you have purchased, please contact your account team.

Overview

As part of a Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription, customers have access to a supported version of Ansible Tower. Red Hat provides a published product life cycle for Ansible Tower so that customers and partners can properly plan, deploy, support, and maintain their on-premise automation clusters that they use with the Automation Platform.

This life cycle encompasses stated time periods for each version of Ansible Tower, such as 3.4 or 3.7. The life cycle for each version of Tower is split into production phases, each identifying the various levels of maintenance over a period of time from the initial release date. While multiple versions of Tower are supported at any one time, note that this life cycle applies to each specific version of Tower (3.4, 3.5, 3.6, and so on), and does not apply to a 2.x or 3.x major version as a whole.

Customers are expected to upgrade their Ansible Tower environments to the most current supported version of the product in a timely fashion. Bug fixes and feature-work will target only the latest versions of the product, though some allowance may be given for high security risk items.

Life Cycle Dates

Ansible Tower Life Cycle

*Please see the lifecycle page here if you are using Tower as a part of Ansible Automation Platform 1.2

Scope of Coverage

Support will be provided for use according to the published Scope of Coverage in Appendix 1 of the Red Hat Enterprise Agreement.

To encourage the rapid adoption of new technologies while keeping the high standard of stability inherent in Red Hat enterprise product, the product life cycle for Red Hat Ansible Tower is divided into three phases of maintenance, described below.

Production Phases

Full Support Phase

During the Full Support Phase, Red Hat will provide:

  • Qualified critical and important security fixes
  • Urgent and high priority bug fixes
  • Select enhanced software functionality

This will be delivered in the form of sub-minor releases.

A release of Ansible Tower is supported under the Full Support Phase for 6 months after its initial release.

Maintenance Support 1 Phase

During the Maintenance Support 1 Phase, Red Hat will provide:

  • Qualified critical security fixes
  • Urgent bug fixes

These fixes will be delivered in the form of sub-minor releases.

A release of Ansible Tower is supported under the Maintenance Support 1 Phase for 6 months after it leaves the Full Support Phase.

Maintenance Support 2 Phase

During the Maintenance Support 2 Phase, Red Hat will provide:

  • Qualified critical security fixes

These fixes will be delivered in the form of sub-minor releases.

A release of Ansible Tower is supported under the Maintenance Support 2 Phase for 6 months after it leaves the Maintenance Support 1 Phase, after which it becomes End Of Life (EOL).

All updates are provided at Red Hat’s discretion.

For information about how Red Hat works with Ansible Automation (aka Core) Support please see here

Summary:

Support Do Not Support
Installation Database Replication/Failover, Customer-Provided Database
Upgrades External applications integrated with Tower (i.e. Splunk, Okta, etc)
Backup/Restore Playbook issues without an Ansible Engine entitlement*
Configuration Custom API integrations
Usage (API and UI) Custom Inventory Scripts and Credentials
Operation Custom Ansible Tower configurations

*Unless it fails in Tower