the thing that keeps me away from ansible is the pricing model. I find 100$/year/server way too much. and nobody can ensure me that the OSS version is all I'll always need.
We're not going to be holding back on anything in Ansible, in fact, we're seeing several hundred contributors each month and are adding an average of 20 new modules to core each release.
This release also adds role dependencies and lots of nice new performance features.
For those looking for better solutions to things from proprietary software vendors, this provides a lot of options. If you're looking to not need those kind of features, Ansible is still there.
One thing we're not going to do is keep making Ansible more and more complicated over time -- there's a major focus on keeping it simple. When I started this project I said "if I can make a consultancy out of this I'm doing it wrong" :)
Actually being a company is good for us -- it allows us to hire extra people to work on Ansible, and it's allowing us to do more for the community not less!
There are no separate versions of Ansible such as what Nginx has done. Ansible AWX adds no further functionality to Ansible except for the UI.
It adds role based access control, centralized logging of what all your playbooks have done, and a way to keep up with the history of your hosts over time. Yes, there's definitely a focus on making things push button, but one of the major ideas here is that I can easily delegate roles to particular members of my team -- lab staff might be able to work with inventory, QA might be able to deploy to the test environment, ops may be able to deploy to production, etc.
This is just our first release but the main goal here is to make the absolutely simplest/best ops tool for teams we can make. If people have ideas, definitely pass info along (info@ansibleworks.com). It would be greatly appreciated!
The next release comes out in about a week and adds some extra bonus features on top as well.
It also includes support -- which is not just asking for bugs, but also us helping provide advice on how to manage your infrastructure.
You should find pricing pretty well in line with some of the competing solutions. If you have questions about pricing not fitting your usage model, definitely contact us for details and we can work with you.
So far, I see no need to use AWX.
I can't ensure you of anything but why not install it in a test instance and give it a try?