Deciding on when to use ansible cli or ansible tower

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Deciding on when to use Ansible cli or Ansible tower

The choice between Ansible CLI and Ansible Tower (now Ansible Automation Platform – AAP) depends on your automation needs, scale, and operational requirements. Here's a breakdown to help you decide:

Use Ansible CLI when:

1. You're managing a small to medium-scale infrastructure – Ideal for individual admins or small teams running ad-hoc automation.
2. You prefer a lightweight solution – CLI requires fewer resources and is easy to set up.
3. You need full control over playbooks – Directly execute and troubleshoot playbooks from the terminal.
4. You don’t require centralized management – Each administrator runs their playbooks manually or with simple scheduling.
5. You’re working with DevOps pipelines – Can integrate into CI/CD workflows via scripts.

Use Ansible Tower (AAP) when:

1. You need enterprise-scale automation – Useful for large teams managing thousands of nodes.
2. You require role-based access control (RBAC) – Enables different users to have varying levels of access and permissions.
3. You want a web-based UI and dashboards – Makes managing jobs, inventory, and logs more visual and accessible.
4. You need centralized logging and reporting – Useful for compliance, auditing, and debugging.
5. You require workflow orchestration – Can chain playbooks and handle complex dependencies between tasks.
6. You need API-driven automation – Provides REST API support to integrate with ITSM tools, CI/CD pipelines, or cloud platforms.
7. You want job scheduling – Supports scheduling recurring tasks and automation workflows.

 Decision Guide:

• For quick, direct automation → Use Ansible CLI.
• For team collaboration, governance, and large-scale automation → Use Ansible Tower (AAP).