Red Hat, Inc. has announced the general availability of Ansible 2.0. This new release of 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 task blocks that 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; and new execution modes provide users with ways to increase the speed of deployments across many machines.
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.
Ansible 2.0 includes a completely new set of modules for managing OpenStack, the leading open source cloud computing framework, developed in concert with the OpenStack community. It has 30 new modules for improving and expanding the support for Amazon Web Services.
It also offers greatlyexpanded support for configuring and managing VMware environments; and expanded support for managing Microsoft Windows environments.
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.
“We strongly believe that our users should be able to focus on improving their business, rather than learning complex tools,” said Tim Cramer, head of Ansible Engineering at Red Hat. “Ansible 2.0 expands upon that vision by delivering increased flexibility in the Ansible Playbook automation language, while still retaining the ease-of-use and simplicity that enables developers and operators to get started quickly.”