Red
Hat, Inc. announced the general availability of Ansible 2.3, the
latest version of the leading simple, powerful, and agentless open
source IT automation framework. Ansible 2.3 provides performance
enhancements and advanced networking capabilities, including adding
connection methods designed to increase flexibility and improve
performance.
The upstream Ansible project is one of the most popular open source automation projects on GitHub with
an active and engaged community. Ansible's modular code base is
powerful enough to manage today's infrastructure, but also easily adapts
to new IT needs and DevOps workflows. With Ansible, developers and IT
operations teams can more quickly automate the entire application
lifecycle - from physical and virtual servers to cloud computing
deployments to Linux containers.
Ansible
2.3 retains a focus on networking infrastructure enablement through new
features as well as providing overall performance enhancements,
including:
Enhanced networking capabilities such
as a persistent connections framework. Persistent connections allow for
one SSH connection to stay active across multiple Ansible tasks -
reducing the total time for completion and delivering up to a 10 times
networking performance improvement in tests conducted by Red Hat and
various partners. For Playbooks to take advantage of persistent
connections in Ansible 2.3, two connection methods have been enabled: 1)
the existing command line interface (CLI) connection method and 2) the
newly added NETCONF connection method.
Additionally,
Ansible 2.3 includes new networking platform support or modules from
Apstra, Arista Networks, Avi Networks, Big Switch Networks, Cumulus
Networks, Fortinet, Huawei, Lenovo, Ordnance, and Palo Alto Networks.
The number of supported networking platforms has grown to 29 and the
total networking module count is now 267.
Broader support for Microsoft Windows with
many new and enhanced modules that make automating Windows with Ansible
easier. Ansible 2.3 also offers pipelining support to boost
performance.
Simplified integration of community contributions with
the introduction of a metadata-based system for modules. There now is
one centralized repository for contributions, tickets, submissions and
more - making it easier for both the community and the Ansible Core team
to manage and drive further community involvement.
Availability
Ansible 2.3 is now available in the following stable branch via GitHub.