Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, has begun shipping an update to its open source IT automation framework, designed to bring increased stability, new automation capabilities, and new integrations with a variety of services and providers. The solution, Ansible 2.0, is intended to better support public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments, as well as 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. “We strongly believe that our users should be able to focus on improving their business, rather than learning complex tools,” says Tim Cramer, head Of Ansible Engineering for 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."
The new release includes task blocks enable easier development of playbooks and tasks, and additionally provide the option to integrate exception handling and recovery. A 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. Increased flexibility in tasks facilitates easier reuse of automation content across a variety of environments and contexts; and logging playbook information to services such as chat, email, or log aggregators can be easily configured through newly included plugins.
Ansible benefits from 2,000 contributors to its repositories on GitHub, as well as 200 new contributors to the 2.0 release, Red Hat states. The new release includes nearly 200 new modules spanning the public, private and hybrid cloud that accommodate for containers, networking, and Windows.
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.
More information is available at the Red Hat website.
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