As we have seen in the previous chapters, Ansible is a very powerful tool. This is not enough to make it ubiquitous. In fact, for it to become ubiquitous, a tool needs to be easy to use at any user level and easy to integrate in various ways with existing environments.
Ansible Inc recognized this and created a tool called Ansible Tower, which was basically a Web UI and API set around Ansible. Ansible Tower was a closed source tool, which was also the main source of revenue for the company. When Red Hat announced that it had acquired Ansible, its management also committed to making Ansible Tower open source. A couple of years later, Red Hat open sourced Ansible Tower, creating the AWX project, which is now the upstream of Ansible Tower, in the same way Fedora is the upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Before AWX, other Web UIs and API sets were developed...