Ansible News - Ansible Core 2.14.4 and Ansible 7.4.0

Analyzing the latest release notes of Ansible Core 2.14.4 and Ansible 7.4.0, a summary of the major changes, and the Ansible 2023 Roadmap.

March 31, 2023

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Welcome to a new episode of the Ansible Pilot from Luca Berton. The big news of the last week of February 2023 is the release of two versions of Ansible: Ansible Core 2.14.4 and Ansible Community 7.4.0. Basically, these are bug-fix releases. Let me quickly remind you that the Ansible Core contains the Ansible framework and the ansible.builtin collection. Nothing else. Whereas the Ansible community includes a lot of other collections. For example, interactive with cloud providers (Amazon, Google, Azure), community-generated collection, and Red Hat vendor partners.

Ansible Core vs Ansible Community

What’s the difference?

The size and amount of resources the Ansible Core is the smallest package. At the same time, the Ansible Community package is more extensive and has many more resources in the footprint. Why did the engineering team release two packages? Well, because sometimes you have a different use case. You want a smaller package for a specific workload. And you would like the Ansible community for her. When developing or needing a complete overview of the answerable project, you can also increase velocity because each piece of the Ansible Core and the collections can be released asynchronously. So, at a different time than Ansible.

The Ansible Core releases 2.14.4 - released 27th March 2023

The Ansible Core release 2.14.4 was a maintenance release on March 27th, 2023. Thank you, Matt Martz, for announcing the release of Ansible Core 2.14.4 (New releases: ansible-core 2.14.4 https://groups.google.com/g/ansible-project/c/Hgx-Mwqamgw) in the Ansible mailing list. This is a maintenance release of the Ansible codename “C’mon, everybody”. Reading the Ansible Release Notes (ansible-core 2.14 “C’mon Everybody” Release Notes https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.14.4/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.14.rst, we can see that this release is almost a bugfix release. Let me remind you that Ansible 2.14 was first introduced in November 2022, if I remember correctly, two weeks before the release of Ansible Automation Platform version 2.3. So basically, this is the foundation, and the most important change is the requirement of at least Python version 3.9. This requirement breaks completely the compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7. I could notice that there was a lot of work on the ansible-test command line tool. This is part of the Red Hat strategy to improve the Developer journey. This tool is specifically designed to test Ansible Collection. That is quite interesting, so it’s worth taking a test in our laboratory and the Ansible blog article about it and how to test and write custom code (Introduction to ansible-test https://www.ansible.com/blog/introduction-to-ansible-test ). On the 27th February there was a release of Ansible Core 2.13.8 backported the bug fixes and the ansible-test command line tool. The Ansible Core 2.13 was released in May 2023 and is still under maintenance until the release of Ansible Core 2.15.

How to install Ansible Core 2.14.4?

Via the PIP python package manager. The PyPI website is already up-to-date. We can download the Ansible Core for the most modern operating system by simply typing in the terminal the following command:

$ pip install ansible-core

In some systems, we need to use the pip3 command line tool instead, part of the python3-pip package. Taking a look at the package history, we saw that, as usual, a release candidate was available on the 21st of March, 2023, just one week before the official release. This is a common practice of the previous Ansible Core release, 2.14.1, released on the 7th of November, 2022. Are you curious about the next thing? As we can see, the Ansible Core Team is already working on the Ansible Core 2.15 roadmap (https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/roadmap/ROADMAP_2_15.html). The expected delivery date in April 2023.

The Ansible Community release 7.4.0 - released 28th March 2023

As usual, the day after the release of the Ansible Core, the Ansible Community package is available as well. This includes the Ansible Core package and some “selected” collections from the full list of the collections available. Thank you, Anwesha Das, for announcing the release updated with Ansible Core 2.14.4 (Ansible 7.3.0 has been Released! https://groups.google.com/g/ansible-project/c/ILuT3R7XGQ4) in the Ansible mailing list. The major changes are the same as in Ansible Core 2.14:

Ansible 7 requires Python 3.9 on the controller, same as ansible-core 2.14.

Variables are now evaluated lazily; only when they are actually used. For example, in ansible-core 2.14 an expression {{ defined_variable or undefined_variable }} does not fail on undefined_variable if the first part of or is evaluated to True as it is not needed to evaluate the second part. Collections added to Ansible 7:
ibm.spectrum_virtualize (version 1.9.0)
inspur.ispim (version 1.0.1)
purestorage.fusion (version 1.1.1)
vultr.cloud (version 1.1.0)

How to install Ansible Community 7.4.0?

We can install the ansible package using the PIP python package manager. The PyPI website is already up-to-date. We can download the Ansible package for the most modern operating system by simply typing in the terminal the following command:

$ pip install ansible

In some systems, we need to use the pip3 command line tool instead part of the python3-pip package. The release cycle follows the same as Ansible Core 2.14 package.

Recap

Red Hat just released a bug fix version of the Ansible Core 2.14.4 on 27th March 2023 and Ansible community package 7.4.0 on 28th March 2023. These are more maintenance releases and bug fixes that improved the ansible-test command line utility. The major disruption is the adoption of Python 3.9. On the one hand, it breaks the compatibility with some old operating systems based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. On the other hand, it fully embraces the latest technology having as a side effect a most modern codebase that runs faster, taking advantage of the latest Python performance feature. The next release cycle is in April 2023, expecting the newest innovation with Ansible Core 2.15.0 and Ansible community package 8.0.0. Thank you so much. Have an excellent automation day. Save the date for the upcoming AnsibleFest 2023 in Boston, USA, 23rd–25th May 2023.

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