AWX: Understanding pods, containers and their images

[vivek shete]

I am pretty new to Kubernetes and installing the AWX tower for the first time with K8s. 

I am really confused which images are used for which containers and which pods these containers belongs to and what are their respective images? Please correct if my understanding below is right.

AWX operator spins up following pods with resp images in their links

pod1: awx-task; containers: web,  rsyslog, redis 

pod2: awx-web; containers: redis, task, rsyslog, ee 

And I have following defined in my custom resource file

ee_images:

- name: {name}

image: https://quay.io/repository/ansible/awx-ee?tab=tags&tag=latest

init_container_image: {https://quay.io/repository/ansible/awx-ee?tab=tags&tag=latest}

init_container_image_version: latest

control_plane_ee_image: {https://quay.io/repository/ansible/awx-ee?tab=tags&tag=latest}

image: {https://quay.io/repository/ansible/awx?tab=tags&tag=19.5.1}

image_version: {tag}

Your help is really appreciated. TIA

[AWX Project]

good question!

awx-task* pod has a container awx-task, and this uses "image" and "image_version" (default is quay.io/ansible/awx:latest)

awx-web* pod has container awx-web, and this also uses "image" and "image_version"

awx-task* pod has a container awx-ee, and this uses "control_plane_ee_image"

ee_images just preloads AWX with additional execution environments (on top of the default execution environment)

the init_container_image is the container that runs on startup for both awx-task* and awx-web* pods]

hope that helps,

AWX Team

[vivek shete]

Thanks for explaining this. Is init container required at all? I am using awx-ee image in my manifest for init_container_image . init container inside task pod didnt come up. However my task and web pods are up and I am able to login to tower UI. 

[AWX Project]

Hi,

The init container(s) are required for normal functionality:

https://github.com/ansible/awx-operator/blob/devel/roles/installer/templates/deployments/web.yaml.j2#L76

https://github.com/ansible/awx-operator/blob/devel/roles/installer/templates/deployments/task.yaml.j2#L75

You can look at the commands here to see the exact steps performed.

Thanks,

AWX Team