DEVOPSdigest

Red Hat announced the general availability of Ansible 2.3, the latest version of the 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.

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.

- 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.

Ansible 2.3 is now available.