Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source
solutions, today announced the general availability of Ansible
2.0. This new release of the leading simple, agentless, and powerful
open source IT automation framework brings increased stability, new
automation capabilities, and new integrations with a variety of services
and providers, broadening support for public, private, and hybrid cloud
deployments, and expanding Ansible’s footprint into Microsoft Windows
environments and network management.
Ansible is designed to enable developer and operators in IT
organizations to quickly learn and deploy the software, empowering them
to break down barriers between IT teams by automating routine
activities. Ansible 2.0 makes getting started with Ansible easier than
ever with the following improvements:
-
Task blocks enable easier development of playbooks and tasks, and
additionally provide the option to integrate exception handling and
recovery;
-
A refined playbook parser provides clearer identification of errors
and provides suggested fixes;
-
New execution modes provide users with ways to increase the speed of
deployments across many machines;
-
Increased flexibility in tasks facilitates easier reuse of automation
content across a variety of environments and contexts; and
-
Logging playbook information to services such as chat, email, or log
aggregators can be easily configured through newly included plugins.
Automation through community-powered innovation
With 2,000 contributors to its repositories on GitHub,
and more than 200 new contributors to the Ansible 2.0 release alone
since the last release, Ansible benefits from a worldwide community of
developers and users with diverse environments and use cases - their
participation and feedback enables Ansible to accommodate requirements
from nearly any IT organization.
The modularity of Ansible’s code base, combined with ease of
contribution, allows Ansible to manage today’s infrastructure, but also
rapidly adapt to new IT needs and integrate emerging technologies
created by contributors to the Ansible community. Ansible 2.0 includes
nearly 200 new modules spanning the public, private and hybrid cloud
that accommodate for containers, networking, Windows - empowering users
to automate more things than ever before.
New module addition highlights include:
-
A completely new set of modules for managing OpenStack, the leading
open source cloud computing framework, developed in concert with the
OpenStack community;
-
30 new modules for improving and expanding the support for Amazon Web
Services;
-
Greatly expanded support for configuring and managing VMware
environments;
-
Expanded support for managing Microsoft Windows environments;
-
Substantial improvements to the Docker module and new Docker
connection plugin; and
-
Improved support for network automation.
Availability
Ansible 2.0 is now available via GitHub,
PyPi,
and package manager for most major Linux distributions. For users
seeking more control, security, and delegation for their Ansible
deployments, Ansible
Tower is available via subscription tiers suitable for everyone from
small companies to full-scale, mission-critical enterprise devops teams.