Ansible is an IT automation tool especially popular within the developers’ community, thanks to its simplicity and agentless nature.
Three months away from its acquisition by Red Hat the company announced the general availability of Ansible 2.0.
This new release is aimed to ease the development of playbooks (Ansible’s automation scripts) and tasks, and expand platforms support with a new set of modules for OpenStack, Amazon AWS, VMware, Microsoft and Docker.
Among the new capabilities introduced we can count:
- 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;
- Logging playbook information to services such as chat, email, or log aggregators can be easily configured through newly included plugins;
- 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.