ansible-build-data VS Ansible

IBM -> RedHat -> Ansible (https://docs.ansible.com/platform.html)

I think the new ansible docs are opaque, and the new "everything is an ansible collection" scheme makes troubleshooting any issues reported by users hundreds of times harder than "the old days"

I keep this (https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-build-data/blob...) bookmarked because it's the only way to match up what "ansible 8.1.0" (https://pypi.org/project/ansible/8.1.0/) even means since it for damn sure not any of this: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/releases (they used to have a 'release' pinned on that releases tab saying "these are not the droids you are looking for"). I believe I tried asking for them to update the completely erroneous pypi "source code" link to point to that repo and ... well, one can see how well that turned out

➡️ Check Release Notes📦️🗒️ and Ansible 8 Porting Guide for more details.

💽You can install it by running the following command or download the release tarball directly from pypi: pip install ansible==8.0.0a1 --user ➡️Check Release Notes 📦️🗒️ and Ansible 8 Porting Guide for more details!

You can find the current list for Ansible 7 here: https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-build-data/blob/main/7/ansible-7.build

Check Release Notes📦️🗒️ and Ansible 6 Porting Guide for more details on changes, improvements, new and deprecated features!!

You can find the release announcement on ansible-announce and the changelog on GitHub. Happy automating!

The vmware.vmware_rest collection has been included in Ansible 5. Thanks to everyone involved!

As https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-build-data/issues/114 showed we should really check the existing collections included in the Ansible package. Some ideas:

Ansible 5.7.0 has been released with updates to 19 of the included Ansible collections! Read the announcement or check out the update changelog to learn more about this new version.

Debian package "ansible" -> called "ansible" on PyPI -> is called "ansible collections" through most of the documentation -> upstream PyPI packages are generated through https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-build-data

Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool that simplifies application deployment, cloud provisioning, and configuration management across diverse environments. It uses a declarative language to describe the desired state of the system, and then takes the necessary actions to achieve that state. Ansible has become incredibly popular due to its simplicity, agentless architecture, and extensive community support. Document: ansible.com, ansible basics

Ansible v2.16

Ansible is a tool used to help manage software automation processes, configuration management across machines, deployment as well as remote execution of commands and scripts. In sports, Ansible operates as the coach of your team by providing strategies (playbooks), and actions, and ensuring the smooth execution of tasks across your infrastructure, just like a coach guides and directs players (Servers)during a game.

They support for-if from python, too: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.1.x/templates/#loop-f... but I haven't tried the "recursive" keyword to know if ansible supports that. I say "ansible supports that" because they don't just drop jinja2 into ansible and call it a draw, they have a bunch of custom execution integrations: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.16.3/lib/ansible/...

To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck

In this article's context, it is simply a tool that provides a declarative way to automate your machine/OS to configure the development machine as you want (install package, modify the configuration, etc). Examples of these tools are Ansible, Puppet, etc.

Now we're getting more tangential, but for years, Ansible releases were named for Van Halen songs (see old Changelog here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.8.4/CHANGELOG.md)

In the lab to follow, we'll quickly provision a 3-node kubeadm cluster (1 master, 2 workers) on the cloud provider of your choice using an automation stack comprised of OpenTofu and Ansible, then deploy Rook Ceph using the official Helm charts and confirm that we are now able to successfully create CSI volume snapshots from PVCs by reusing the MinIO example from our last article.