Ansible Fest Atlanta 2019

Ansible Fest Atlanta 2019

Announcements on Ansible, AWX, Molecule, Galaxy, Ansible-lint and many other produts are always done on Ansible Fest.

Here is what I picked up on Ansible Fest 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Ansible Collections

Ansible if full of modules, “batteries included” is a common expression. This reduces velocity in adding modules, fixing issues with modules or adding features to modules. Ansible Collections is there to solve this issue.

Ansible will (in a couple of releases) only be the framework, without modules or plugins. Modules will have to be installed seprarately.

There are a few unknowns:

• How to manage dependencies between collections and Ansible. For example, what collections work on which Ansible version.
• The documentation of Ansible is very important, but how to keep the same central point of documentation while spreading all these collections.
• How to deal with colliding module names? Imaging the file module is included in more than 1 collection, which one takes precedence?

Anyway, the big take-away: Start to learn to develop or use Ansible Collections, it’s going to be important.

Here is how to develop Ansible Collections and how to use them.

AWX

AWX is refactoring components to improve development velocity and the performance of the product itself.

• New UI, based on React and Pattern-Fly.
• tower-cli will be replaced by awx, which exposed the availabe commands based on the capabilities of the AWX API. The version of awx will be the same as the AWX web/api-tool.

Data analysis

There are a few applications to analyse data and give insights on development and usage of Ansible:

• Roles analysis
• Modules details
• Pull requests per country

There are many more perspectives, have a look.

Next Ansible Fest not in Europe

Spain seems to be the largest contributor of Ansible, but next Ansible Fest will be in San Diego.

The Contributors Summit will be in Europe though.