Red Hat Releases Ansible 2.0, Expanding Support for Hybrid Cloud Deployments and Introducing New Automation Capabilities

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, 17th January, 2016- Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) , the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Ansible 2.0. This new release of the leading simple, agentless, and powerful open source IT automation framework brings increased stability, new automation capabilities, and new integrations with a variety of services and providers, broadening support for public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments, and expanding Ansible’s footprint into 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. Ansible 2.0 makes getting started with Ansible easier than ever with the following improvements:

Task blocks enable easier development of playbooks and tasks, and additionally provide the option to integrate exception handling and recovery;
A refined playbook parser provides clearer identification of errors and provides suggested fixes;
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.

Automation through community-powered innovation

With 2,000 contributors to its repositories on GitHub, and more than 200 new contributors to the Ansible 2.0 release alone since the last release, Ansible benefits from a worldwide community of developers and users with diverse environments and use cases -- their participation and feedback enables Ansible to accommodate requirements from nearly any IT organization.

The modularity of Ansible’s code base, combined with ease of contribution, allows Ansible to manage today’s infrastructure, but also rapidly adapt to new IT needs and integrate emerging technologies created by contributors to the Ansible community. Ansible 2.0 includes nearly 200 new modules spanning the public, private and hybrid cloud that accommodate for containers, networking, Windows -  empowering users to automate more things than ever before.

New module addition highlights include:

A completely new set of modules for managing OpenStack, the leading open source cloud computing framework, developed in concert with the OpenStack community;
30 new modules for improving and expanding the support for Amazon Web Services;
Greatly expanded support for configuring and managing VMware environments;
Expanded support for managing Microsoft Windows environments;
Substantial improvements to the Docker module and new Docker connection plugin; and
Improved support for network automation.

Availability

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 suitable for everyone from small companies to full-scale, mission-critical enterprise devops teams.

Supporting Quotes

Tim Cramer, head of Ansible Engineering at Red Hat

“We strongly believe that our users should be able to focus on improving their business, rather than learning complex tools. 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.”

Monty Taylor, OpenStack Technical Committee and core member, OpenStack Infrastructure team

“Ansible is embraced by many users and operators in the OpenStack ecosystem. The OpenStack Infrastructure team is proud to have participated in the development of the OpenStack modules in Ansible 2.0, which provide comprehensive and interoperable support for OpenStack for both cloud operators and cloud users."