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What's new in Ansible 2.0
Round Two
According to Ansible's changelog [1], the name "Ansible" comes from Ursula K. Le Guin's 1966 novel Rocannon's World . Her communicator of the same name operates at greater than the speed of light, without delay, with any place in the universe.
Today's admins are more likely to know Ansible as an orchestration tool and competitor to Puppet, Chef, and Salt. Ansible [2] was acquired by Red Hat in 2015, and although it has generated no major headlines, it has seen some new releases.
A blog on the Ansible site [3] described the new features of the current version, one of which is related to execution speed. The team revised parts of the engine so that it now parses playbook and other YAML files faster. Additionally, Ansible 2.0 offers useful extensions and more than 200 new modules – mainly for OpenStack and CloudStack and Windows.
Ansible is available in free and commercial versions. In contrast to many of its competitors, it does not rely on agents on managed systems, using instead a Python interpreter. Although this arrangement simplifies getting started, admins need to trigger the configuration change themselves.
Most distributions currently still have version 1.9 as the default package. The Ansible website has the latest version 2.0, along with instructions for installing the software on the major operating systems and Linux distributions [4]. Gentoo Linux, which resides on the lab computer, already has the current version as a repository package. All I needed was an entry in the /etc/portage/package.accepted_keywords file for the next update to receive the latest Ansible.
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