The Bullhorn

A Newsletter for the Ansible Developer Community
Issue #10, 2020-09-16

Welcome to The Bullhorn, our newsletter for the Ansible developer community. If you have any questions or content you’d like to share, please reach out to us at the-bullhorn@redhat.com, or comment on this GitHub issue.
 

KEY DATES

• 2020-09-15: ansible-2.10.0 rc1 (moved from 10-Sep)
• 2020-09-17: community IRC meeting (any blockers for release should be proposed and discussed here)
• 2020-09-22: ansible-2.10 GA release date

 

ANSIBLE 2.10.0 RC1 NOW AVAILABLE

The Ansible Community team announced the availability of Ansible 2.10.0 release candidate 1 on September 15th. This new Ansible package should be a drop-in replacement for Ansible 2.9; the roles and playbooks that you currently use should work out of the box with ansible-2.10.0 rc1. For more information on how to download, test, and report issues, read Toshio Kuratomi’s announcement to the ansible-devel mailing list.

The ansible-2.10.0 prereleases continue to be updated for testing purposes. Ansible 2.10.0 beta 2 was uploaded to pypi last week, and Ansible 2.10.0 rc1 is now available on pypi as mentioned above.

For more release details, please take a look at:

• Ansible 2.10 release schedule
• Changes to the ansible-2.10.0 pre-release schedule

 

ANSIBLE-BASE 2.10.1 NOW GENERALLY AVAILABLE

The Ansible Base team announced the general release of Ansible 2.10.1 on September 14th. This ansible-base package consists of only the Ansible execution engine, related tools (e.g. ansible-galaxy, ansible-test), and a very small set of built-in plugins, and is also bundled with the larger Ansible distribution. For more information on how to download, test, and report issues, read Rick Elrod’s announcement to the ansible-devel mailing list.
 

ROLE/COLLECTION PUBLISHERS: CHANGES TO ANSIBLE-GALAXY LOGIN

If you use the ansible-galaxy CLI to publish roles or collections to Galaxy, you may care about this. The GitHub API that underlies the ansible-galaxy login command is being removed in November. Without it, users doing role or collection publishing operations via the Galaxy CLI will need to find their Galaxy token interactively in a browser and pass it using a config file (as the ability to generate a token from the CLI will no longer function). We're not sure what people do today or how much this option is used out in the world, so please read and weigh in here in the next few days if you have an opinion.
 

NEW/UPDATED COMMUNITY COLLECTIONS

The Ansible Podman collection has a new module podman_network for the management of Podman networking.
 

THE ANSIBLE TEAM IS HIRING

The Ansible Community Team is hiring engineers to help with onboarding Ansible contributors. For more info, please see the following job descriptions:

• Senior Software Community Engineer - Ansible Project - EU
• Senior Software Community Engineer - Ansible Project - US

 

CONTENT FROM THE ANSIBLE COMMUNITY

• Writing a custom Ansible module by Vincent Bernat
• Ansible Inventory Diff Github Action by Will Thames

 

ANSIBLE CONTRIBUTOR SUMMIT - PART OF ANSIBLEFEST 2020

Due to overwhelming interest in the AnsibleFest 2020 edition of the Ansible Contributor Summit, we are planning 2 days of program for you, depending on where you are in your contribution journey. These will be held on October 12 and 15, 2020.

Take a look at the wiki page to find out how the two days will be structured, and register via the corresponding links. We look forward to your participation at the Contributor Summit!
 

OPEN SOURCE AUTOMATION DAYS

We will be a part of Open Source Automation Days, which will be an online event from October 19-21, 2020. Check out the speakers and topics, as well as workshops, and get tickets here if you’re interested.
 

ANSIBLE VIRTUAL MEETUPS

The following virtual meetups are being held in the Ansible community over the next month:

• Ansible Minneapolis - Multicloud Networking for DevOps
  • Thu, Sep 17 · 6:30 PM CDT
     
• Ansible New Zealand - Infrastructure Automation with Ansible + HPE
  • Thu, Sep 24 · 12:00 PM GMT+12
     
• Ansible in DevOps Torun-Bydgoszcz - #8 Meeting AiDO GCP Anthos
  • Wed, Sep 30 · 5:00 PM GMT+2
     
• Ansible Montréal and Québec - Rencontre Septembre 2020
  • Wed, Sep 30 · 6:00 PM EDT

Note: For these virtual meetups, the links to participate will be visible once you RSVP to attend. If you’re interested in the topics presented, you can join from anywhere in the world as long as the time zone and language works for you!
 

FEEDBACK

Have any questions you’d like to ask, or issues you’d like to see covered? Please send us an email at the-bullhorn@redhat.com.

 

 

The Bullhorn

A Newsletter for the Ansible Developer Community

Welcome to The Bullhorn, our newsletter for the Ansible developer community. If you have any questions or content you’d like to share, please reach out to us at the-bullhorn@redhat.com, or comment on this GitHub issue.
 

ANSIBLE 2.10.0 BETA 1 NOW AVAILABLE

The Ansible Community team announced the availability of Ansible 2.10.0 beta 1 on September 1st. This new Ansible package should be a drop-in replacement for Ansible 2.9; the roles and playbooks that you currently use should work out of the box with ansible-2.10.0 beta1. For more information on how to download, test, and report issues, read Toshio Kuratomi’s announcement to the ansible-devel mailing list.
 

ANSIBLE-BASE 2.10.1 RC2 NOW AVAILABLE

The Ansible Base team announced a release candidate of Ansible 2.10.1 on August 31st. This ansible-base package consists of only the Ansible execution engine, related tools (e.g. ansible-galaxy, ansible-test), and a very small set of built-in plugins, and is also bundled with the larger Ansible distribution. For more information on how to download, test, and report issues, read Rick Elrod’s announcement to the ansible-devel mailing list.
 

ANSIBLE 2.9.13 AND 2.8.15 RELEASED

The Ansible Core team announced the availability of Ansible 2.9.13 and Ansible 2.8.15 on August 31st, both of which are maintenance releases. Follow this link for Rick Elrod’s email to the ansible-devel mailing list, to obtain details on what’s new, installation instructions, and links to the full changelogs.
 

COLLECTION OWNERS: CHANGELOGS FOR ANSIBLE 2.10

Reminder for collection owners: please update your collections with appropriate changelogs by Monday, September 7. See Generating Changelogs for a collection for details on using the Ansible-provided tool. You can also link directly to your own changelogs or release notes by adding the link to an issue here by that same date.
 

NEW/UPDATED COMMUNITY COLLECTIONS

vmware.vmware_rest collection 0.1.0 has been released. It's a new VMware collection that is built on top of the vSphere REST API. The modules focus on guest management and can be mixed with the modules from community.vmware collection.
 

THE ANSIBLE TEAM IS HIRING

The Ansible Community Team is hiring engineers to help with onboarding Ansible contributors. For more info, please see the following job descriptions:

• Senior Software Community Engineer - Ansible Project - EU
• Senior Software Community Engineer - Ansible Project - US

The Ansible Documentation Team is hiring a technical writer. The job is listed in Raleigh, NC, but we will consider remote applicants. If you're interested or have any questions, reach out to us on the #ansible-docs channel on freenode IRC. We've had a lot of applicants already, so act fast!

• Technical Writer - Ansible Project - US

 

CONTENT FROM THE ANSIBLE COMMUNITY

• Pulp Ansible 0.2.0 is Generally Available by Melanie Corr (Pulp project)
• CI of the Ansible modules for VMware: a retrospective by Gonéri Le Bouder
• User survey: Are you using ARA with Ansible? What is your use case? Please comment on the survey issue!

 

ANSIBLEFEST VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE 2020

This year’s AnsibleFest will be a virtual experience! Find out the latest details about the event in this blog post, and register here. We are also having our Ansible Contributor Summit alongside AnsibleFest. More details will be shared soon!
 

ANSIBLE VIRTUAL MEETUPS

The following virtual meetups are being held in the Ansible community over the next month:

• Ansible Buenos Aires - Code4ndreani: Ansible 101
  • Wed, Sep 2 · 6:00 PM GMT-3
     
• Ansible Melbourne September Meetup: Ansible and REST API's
  • Wed, Sep 9 · 1:00 AM GMT+10
     
• Ansible London [virtual] meetup – 10th Sept
  • Thu, Sep 10 · 5:45 PM GMT+1

Note: For these virtual meetups, the links to participate will be visible once you RSVP to attend. If you’re interested in the topics presented, you can join from anywhere in the world as long as the time zone and language works for you!
 

FEEDBACK

Have any questions you’d like to ask, or issues you’d like to see covered? Please send us an email at the-bullhorn@redhat.com.

 

 

The Bullhorn

A Newsletter for the Ansible Developer Community

Welcome to The Bullhorn, our newsletter for the Ansible developer community. If you have any questions or content you’d like to share, please reach out to us at the-bullhorn@redhat.com, or comment on this GitHub issue.
 

ANSIBLE 2.10.0 ALPHA 9 NOW AVAILABLE

The Ansible Community team announced the availability of Ansible 2.10.0 Alpha 9 on August 14th. This new Ansible package should be a drop-in replacement for Ansible 2.9; the roles and playbooks that you currently use should work out of the box with ansible-2.10.0 alpha9. For more information on how to download, test, and report issues, read Toshio Kuratomi’s announcement to the ansible-devel mailing list.
 

ANSIBLE-BASE 2.10.0 NOW GENERALLY AVAILABLE

The Ansible Base team announced the general availability of ansible-base 2.10.0 on August 13th. This ansible-base package consists of only the Ansible execution engine, related tools (e.g. ansible-galaxy, ansible-test), and a very small set of built-in plugins, and is also bundled with the larger Ansible distribution. For more information on how to download, test, and report issues, read Rick Elrod’s announcement to the ansible-devel mailing list.
 

ANSIBLE 2.9.12 AND 2.8.14 RELEASED

The Ansible Core team announced the availability of Ansible 2.9.12 and Ansible 2.8.14 on August 10th, both of which are maintenance releases. Follow this link for Rick Elrod’s email to the ansible-devel mailing list, to obtain details on what’s new, installation instructions, and links to the full changelogs.
 

NEW/UPDATED COMMUNITY COLLECTIONS

Ansible Podman collection has been updated recently with new Podman modules: podman_volume to manage Podman container volumes on the host, podman_pod and podman_pod_info - for managing Podman pods. Podman and Buildah connection plugins now support non-root users connections. All modules and plugins support Podman both versions v1 and v2. A few bugs of idempotency for podman_container module have been fixed. You can find updated documentation here.

The Red Hat Automation Community of Practice has created a Galaxy Collection for AWX and Tower Configuration. The goal is to allow users to define all AWX/Tower Objects as Code. If you manage large scale, complex AWX or Tower instances it is worth checking out.

Here's an update on the latest beta release of the IBM z/OS core collection, including three new z/OS core modules in Ansible Galaxy: zos_mvs_raw, zos_lineinfile, and zos_copy.

The collections for Zabbix and Grafana are now both at version 1.0.0, freshly released by the community over the weekend on August 16th! They are available on Ansible Galaxy: Grafana collection and Zabbix collection.
 

COLLECTION PROPOSALS

YANG and NETCONF are vendor agnostic IETF standards that are used mainly for network device management. The proposal linked here outlines how Ansible plugins in community.yang collection will ease managing YANG and NETCONF enabled devices using structured data. The plugins will provide maximum flexibility (YANG variant independent) and provide a simple-to-use approach. Review comments/suggestions/feedback are welcomed from the community.
 

ANSIBLE-LINT 4.3.0 RELEASED WITH ANSIBLE 2.10 SUPPORT

The ansible-lint community is happy to announce the release of ansible-lint 4.3.0. This release includes more than 330 commits since v4.2.0.1, made over the past 6 months.
 

ANSIBLE COMMUNITY STATS UPDATE

With two Virtual Contributor Summits under our belt (and thus two surveys) we can start to look at the data they provide. Greg plans to do a longer post after the next Summit, looking at trends and so forth, but for now, here’s how people felt about the July Summit - pretty positive!


 

CONTENT FROM THE ANSIBLE COMMUNITY

• Release and Deploy Ansible Collection with GitHub Actions by Jose Angel Munoz
• Ansible: Generating password with constraints by Abhijeet Kasurde

 

THE ANSIBLE COMMUNITY TEAM IS HIRING

The Ansible Community team is hiring engineers to help with onboarding Ansible contributors. For more info, please see the following job descriptions:

• Senior Software Community Engineer - Ansible Project - EU
• Senior Software Community Engineer - Ansible Project - US
• Technical Writer - Ansible Project - US

 

ANSIBLEFEST VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE 2020

This year’s AnsibleFest will be a virtual experience! Find out the latest details about the event in this blog post, and register here. We are also having our Ansible Contributor Summit alongside AnsibleFest. More details will be shared soon!
 

ANSIBLE VIRTUAL MEETUPS

The following virtual meetups are being held in the Ansible community over the next month:

• Ansible Minneapolis: Enhancing Cisco ACI Automation with Ansible Tower and Collections
  • Thu, Aug 20 · 6:30 PM CDT
     
• Ansible Toronto August 2020 (virtual)
  • Tue, Aug 25 · 12:00 PM EDT
     
• Ansible NYC: Multicloud Networking Leveraging Ansible and Pureport
  • Tue, Aug 25 · 6:00 PM EDT
     
• Ansible London [virtual] meetup – 10th Sept
  • Thu, Sep 10 · 5:45 PM GMT+1

 
Note: For these virtual meetups, the links to participate will be visible once you RSVP to attend. If you’re interested in the topics presented, you can join from anywhere in the world as long as the time zone and language works for you!
 

FEEDBACK

Have any questions you’d like to ask, or issues you’d like to see covered? Please send us an email at the-bullhorn@redhat.com.

 

 

The Bullhorn

A Newsletter for the Ansible Developer Community

Welcome to The Bullhorn, our newsletter for the Ansible developer community. If you have any questions or content you’d like to share, please reach out to us at the-bullhorn@redhat.com.
 

ANSIBLE 2.10.0 ALPHA 6 NOW AVAILABLE

The Ansible Community team announced the availability of Ansible 2.10.0 Alpha 6 on July 28th. This new Ansible package should be a drop-in replacement for Ansible 2.9; the roles and playbooks that you currently use should work out of the box with ansible-2.10.0 alpha6. For more information on how to download, test, and report issues, read Toshio Kuratomi’s announcement to the ansible-devel mailing list.
 

ANSIBLE-BASE 2.10.0 RELEASE CANDIDATE 3 NOW AVAILABLE

The Ansible Base team announced the pre-release availability of Ansible 2.10.0 RC 3 on July 24th. This ansible-base package consists of only the Ansible execution engine, related tools (e.g. ansible-galaxy, ansible-test), and a very small set of built-in plugins, and is also bundled with the larger Ansible distribution. For more information on how to download, test, and report issues, read Rick Elrod’s announcement to the ansible-devel mailing list.
 

COLLECTION MODULE DOCUMENTATION AVAILABLE NOW

After significant months of effort, we have now restored the module-level documentation on docs.ansible.com! This effort required coordination between the Ansible docs team and the community team and developers to pull the module documentation from the collections on Galaxy and publish them on our docsite again. For more information, read Sandra McCann’s announcement to the ansible-devel mailing list.
 

ANSIBLE STATS UPDATE

As promised in his recent tweet, Greg Sutcliffe has gone into more detail on what the bubble plot from the last issue represents, answering many questions about the details of the plot, and examining the possible uses of such graphics.
 

CONTENT FROM THE ANSIBLE COMMUNITY

• Using Ansible Molecule to test roles in monorepos
• Pulp Squeezer - an Ansible collection to manage Pulp
• Building and Publishing Documentation for Ansible Collections
• Building Documentation for Collections Using Antsibull

 

ANSIBLE VIRTUAL MEETUPS

The following virtual meetups are being held in the Ansible community over the next month:

Ansible NOVA August Session
Wed, Aug 12 · 4:00 PM EDT
https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-NOVA/events/271964842/

Ansible New Zealand: building stateless self configuring Ansible Clusters
Thu, Aug 13 · 12:00 PM GMT+12
https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-New-Zealand/events/271707416/
 

FEEDBACK

Have any questions you’d like to ask, or issues you’d like to see covered? Please send us an email at the-bullhorn@redhat.com.

 

 

The Bullhorn

A Newsletter for the Ansible Developer Community

Welcome to The Bullhorn, our newsletter for the Ansible developer community. If you have any questions or content you’d like to share, please reach out to us at the-bullhorn@redhat.com.
 

ANSIBLE 2.8.13 AND 2.9.10 RELEASED

VIRTUAL ANSIBLE CONTRIBUTOR SUMMIT RECAP

UPDATES FROM THE WORKING GROUPS

• The Ansible community has launched a new working group focused on improving diversity and inclusion in the project. Community members looking to get involved with this initiative can join #ansible-diversity on Freenode IRC. You can also check out the announcement made at the Virtual Ansible Contributor Summit last week.

 

STATS UPDATE

Greg 'Gwmngilfen' Sutcliffe, our team stats person, has been hard at work on some of the suggestions that came out of the Contributor Summit. One such idea, from Jeff Geerling, was some kind of heatmap of contributors, so that we can see where there is activity, and also potentially some "bus-factor". Here's a first cut of that map:

The colour ranges from "1 contributor" in red to "lots" in pool, with white centred at 5 unique contributors.

Community.General has such a large number of contributors that it overshadows the others - but note how many collections are <5 contributors for any single file, but largely healthy at the directory level, which is good to see! You can see a bigger version on the Ansible Stats pages if you want to zoom in.
 

COMMUNITY CONTENT

Every month we notice the community posting great content. Although not all strictly developer focussed, maybe there’s an article or two here that piques your interest? Let us know if you’d like to see more of this.

Evgeni Golov details how they mass-migrated modules inside an Ansible Collection for the Foreman project, complete with the script used.

Wu shares how he manages Windows Servers with Ansible on CentOS 8.

Here’s Part 1 and Part 2 of Kubernetes Configuration Management with Ansible by Baptiste Mille-Mathias, who also joined us at the virtual contributor summit.

Tadej Borovšak of XLAB Steampunk covers an important topic - testing - with Adding integration tests to Ansible Content Collections.

Nicolas Leiva describes how you can make your favorite Python library an Ansible module to Automate a Network Security Workflow.

Carol Chen, part of the Ansible Community team, talks about connecting and growing your community with examples from the Ansible community meetup groups.
 

ANSIBLE VIRTUAL MEETUPS

The following virtual meetups are being held in the Ansible community over the next month:

Ansible in DevOps Torun-Bydgoszcz: QA in DevOps World
Wed, Jul 15 · 5:00 PM GMT+2
https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-in-DevOps-Torun-Bydgoszcz/events/271620303/ 

Ansible Minneapolis: Using Ansible to Create AWS AMI Images
Thu, Jul 16 · 6:30 PM GMT-5
https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-Minneapolis/events/sbqkgrybckbvb/

Ansible India Meetup: Getting Started with Ansible Network Automation
Sat, Jul 18 · 9:45 AM GMT+5:30
RSVP with one of the meetup groups “near” you: Aurangabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune! (They will link to the same virtual event.)

Ansible Fort Worth/Dallas: Multicloud Networking Leveraging Ansible and Pureport
Tue, Jul 28 · 4:00 PM GMT-6
https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-Fort-Worth/events/271912439/
https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-Dallas/events/271912537/

Ansible New Zealand: building stateless self configuring Ansible Clusters
Thu, Aug 13 · 12:00 PM GMT+12
https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-New-Zealand/events/271707416/ 

Here is the playlist from the previous Ansible India Meetup held on June 27.

Note: For these virtual events, the links to participate in the meetups will be visible once you RSVP to attend. If you’re interested in the topics presented, you can join from anywhere in the world as long as the time zone and language works for you!
 

FEEDBACK

Have any questions you’d like to ask, or issues you’d like to see covered? Please send us an email at the-bullhorn@redhat.com.

 

 

The Bullhorn

A Newsletter for the Ansible Developer Community

Welcome to The Bullhorn, our newsletter for the Ansible developer community. If you have any questions or content you’d like to share, please reach out to us at the-bullhorn@redhat.com.
 

ANSIBLE-BASE 2.10 BETA 1 RELEASED

On June 17th, the Ansible Core team released the first beta of ansible-base-2.10.

The ansible-base package consists of only the Ansible execution engine, related tools (e.g. ansible-galaxy, ansible-test), and a very small set of built-in plugins; the remaining content has been moved into Ansible collections, which can now be installed separately. For more details on what’s new, installation instructions, and a link to the full changelog, read Matt Davis’s announcement to the ansible-devel mailing list.
 

ANSIBLE-2.10 ALPHA 1 RELEASED

On June 18th, the Ansible Community team released the first alpha of ansible-2.10. This Ansible package is comparable with, and intended to be a drop-in replacement for, previous versions of Ansible; collections with all previously available modules have been reintegrated into this package. For more details on installation instructions, known issues, and upcoming release plans, read Toshio Kuratomi’s announcement to the ansible-devel mailing list.
 

NEW ANSIBLE CONTENT COLLECTIONS RELEASED

The initial release of Red Hat-maintained Ansible Content Collections have been published to Automation Hub for automating select platforms from Arista, AWS, Cisco, IBM, Juniper, Splunk and more. Community versions are also available from Ansible Galaxy. For more information, read Andrius Benokraitis’s blog post on ansible.com.
 

NEW ANSIBLE COMMUNITY COLLECTIONS RELEASED

Two key Ansible community collections, community.general and community.network, reached 0.2.0 last week, which is an important milestone in their development. See https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.general/issues/507 and https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.network/issues/64 for more information on their release cycles.
 

REMINDER: VIRTUAL ANSIBLE CONTRIBUTOR SUMMIT

The next Ansible Contributor Summit is less than two weeks away! It’s scheduled for Monday, July 6th, with hackathon days to follow on the 7th and 8th. Please register on Eventbrite if you plan to attend any part of the event.

For the agenda, check out the “Potential Topics” section on the etherpad, add topics you’d like to see discussed or vote on existing topics.
 

COMMUNITY WORKING GROUP HIGHLIGHTS

The community working group meets on Wednesdays at 18:00 UTC in #ansible-community on Freenode IRC. You can import this URL community.ics to your own calendar if you’d like to receive reminders. To see what's being discussed and add your own topics see the agenda.

One of the aims of the Bullhorn is to keep people informed about important changes to contributors. With the move to a distributed codebase, in the form of collections and their repos, it's even more important that we improve communication. So, we will be including a summary of the recent changes that you as (potential) contributors or collection maintainers should be aware of.

Changes impacting contributors:

• As ansible-base 2.10 beta1 has been released, now is the time to ensure that your repos are running ansible-test sanity from the ansible/ansible:stable-2.10 branch. If you don't yet have CI setup you can copy the "Sanity" section from ansible-test GitHub Action example.
• Also on the CI front, you should copy tests/sanity/ignore-2.10.txt to tests/sanity/ignore-2.11.txt in preparation for running sanity tests from stable-2.10 and devel branches of ansible-base.
• We are happy to announce that the way to define and document deprecations has been agreed on. Ansible-test (included in ansible-base 2.10) has been updated to check these, so you should review and update as needed.
• As deprecations are now defined in a collections meta/runtime.yml, ANSIBLE_METADATA is no longer needed, so you can bulk delete this from all modules in your collection, see dropping ANSIBLE_METADATA for details.
• To speed up your unit and integration tests you may wish to review the Python dependencies you are pulling in, check out part A and part B for more information.
• There is now a process for automatically generating changelogs, for information on how to achieve this check out this guide.

We recommend that you subscribe (with the button on the right hand side) to https://github.com/ansible-collections/overview/issues/45 which is where changes will be announced in advance.

If you need help with any of this, please join us in #ansible-devel on Freenode.
 

ANSIBLE PULL REQUEST REVIEW DAY

On Wednesday the 17th July we hosted the first "Big PR review day" since the move to collections. It was a good opportunity for people to find out about the collections work and how things are progressing. We had 15 people join in, of which two were brand new contributors to Ansible.

The next PR review day will be in August, subscribe to Big PR Review Day to find out when.
 

ANSIBLE VIRTUAL MEETUPS

The following virtual meetups are being held in the Ansible community over the next month:

Ansible India Meetup: Ansible 2.10, Collections, and more!
Sat, Jun 27 · 10:00 AM UTC+5:30
RSVP with one of the meetup groups “near” you: Bangalore, Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Aurangabad, Chennai, Hyderabad, or Pune! (They will link to the same virtual event.)

Ansible NOVA: Multicloud Networking leveraging Ansible and Pureport!
Tue, Jun 30 · 4:00 PM EDT
https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-NOVA/events/271232565/

Ansible New Zealand: Ansible for Windows. How, Why and When?
Thu, Jul 9 · 12:00 PM GMT+12
https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-New-Zealand/events/271155213/

Note: For these virtual events, the links to participate will be visible once you RSVP to attend. If you’re interested in the topics presented, you can join from anywhere in the world as long as the time zone and language works for you!

Interested in presenting at an Ansible virtual meetup? Sign up here: https://forms.gle/aG5zpVkXDVMHLERX9
 

FEEDBACK

Have any questions you’d like to ask, or issues you’d like to see covered? Please send us an email at the-bullhorn@redhat.com.

 

 

The Bullhorn

A Newsletter for the Ansible Developer Community

Welcome to The Bullhorn, our newsletter for the Ansible developer community. If you have any questions or content you’d like to share, please reach out to us at the-bullhorn@redhat.com.
 

VIRTUAL ANSIBLE CONTRIBUTOR SUMMIT

The next Ansible Contributor Summit will be on Monday, July 6th, with hackathon days to follow on the 7th and 8th. Please register on Eventbrite if you plan to attend any part of the event, and add agenda items for potential discussion on the etherpad.

 

ANSIBLE BIG PR DAYS

The awesome Ansible community contributes lots of pull requests (PRs) every month. Sometimes the volume of incoming PRs can mean contributors having to wait a long time for them to be merged, or even reviewed. We are going to change that by having dedicated PR review days.

The next one will be Wednesday 17th June 2020 from 14:00 UTC (what's this in my timezone). We’re really excited about this, as it will be the first one to focus on Collections.

What we want to achieve:

• Give potential new community contributors a place to learn and experiment with Ansible's review process

• Improve the process and documentation by getting feedback from you

  • Feedback from people starting their journey with open source is particularly important to us, as it helps to identify and improve processes and documentation that may have evolved over time to become complicated. People that have been contributing for a while have already built up this knowledge and have forgotten what it was like to simply not know how to do something!

• Identify PRs that can be merged or closed

Help PRs that are not covered by one of the existing Ansible Working Groups, and therefore may accidentally fall through the cracks

If you have some time during the day to join us, please feel free to take part or even just listen in.

For more information on how to join see https://github.com/ansible/community/issues/407

 

NEW WEEKLY COMMUNITY MEETING

Based on community feedback, we have regular weekly meetings on Wednesdays at 18:00 UTC in #ansible-collections on Freenode IRC. You can import this URL community.ics to your own calendar if you’d like to receive reminders.

This is a great opportunity to find out about the progress being made towards Ansible 2.10 and specifically moving from the monorepo (github.com/ansible/ansible) to the many Collection repositories.

To see what's been discussed so far, take a look at  https://github.com/ansible/community/issues/539

 

COMMUNITY DATA ANALYSIS

Greg Sutcliffe, our community data scientist, has a new blog post on the real statistics of community.general and why it pays to properly test your code. It turns out the graph we published in issue #2 was incorrect, and he details what happened, what the real graphs are, and where we're taking this. Here's a teaser:

 

 

COMMUNITY CONTENT

Every month we notice the community posting great content. Although not all strictly developer focussed, maybe there’s an article or two here that piques your interest? Let us know if you’d like to see more of this.
 

Make integration tests for your Ansible Collection fast! A story of how Steampunks made Sensu Go Ansible Collection’s test times as short as possible.
 

Serge van Ginderachter has a gist with example code for an inventory plugin.
 

Testing Ansible roles using Molecule and Podman. Ilkka Tengvall is an Ansible Solutions Architect based in Helsinki, Finland. Here he talks through his role testing setup, and even has a short video for your enjoyment too.

Mint Security have written about Installing Splunk with Ansible.
 

Stuart Cunliffe from IBM has a lengthy discussion on Ansible on YouTube. He talks about how it relates to IBM Power Systems and its integration with IBM PowerVC. In this video he demonstrates Ansible modules, playbooks and roles, as well as showing Ansible deploying new PowerVM LPARs.

 

ANSIBLE VIRTUAL MEETUPS

The following virtual meetups are being held in the Ansible community over the next month:

 

Ansible Paris Meetup #19

Fri, Jun 12 · 6:30 PM UTC+2

https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-Paris/events/271033303/

 

Ansible Minneapolis: Self-Service Infrastructure Provisioning in the Cloud

Thu, Jun 18 · 6:30 PM CDT

https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-Minneapolis/events/sbqkgrybcjbxb/

 

Ansible Toronto June 2020

Fri, Jun 19 · 12:00 PM EDT

https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-Toronto/events/271081384/ 

 

Ansible India Meetup

Sat, Jun 27 · 10:00 AM UTC+5:30

RSVP with one of the meetup groups “near” you: Bangalore, Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Aurangabad, Chennai, Hyderabad, or Pune! (They will link to the same virtual event.)

Note: For these virtual events, the links to participate will be visible once you RSVP to attend. If you’re interested in the topics presented, you can join from anywhere in the world as long as the time zone and language works for you!

We are planning more virtual meetups to reach a broader audience, and we want to hear from you! Have you started using Ansible recently, or are you a long-time user? How has Ansible improved your workflow or scaled up your automation? What are some of the challenges you’ve faced and lessons learned? Share your experience by presenting at a Virtual Ansible Meetup: https://forms.gle/aG5zpVkXDVMHLERX9

You’ll have the option to pre-record the presentation, and be available during the meetup for live Q&A, or deliver the presentation live. We will work with you on the optimal set up, and share with you some cool Ansible swag!
 

FEEDBACK

Have any questions you’d like to ask, or issues you’d like to see covered? Please send us an email to the-bullhorn@redhat.com.

 

 

The Bullhorn

A Newsletter for the Ansible Developer Community

Welcome to The Bullhorn, our newsletter for the Ansible developer community. If you have any questions or content you’d like to share, please reach out to us at the-bullhorn@redhat.com.

 

ANSIBLEFEST 2020 IS NOW A VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE

The AnsibleFest Virtual Experience will be a free, immersive multi-day event the week of October 12th, 2020, that will deliver timely and useful customer keynotes, breakout sessions, direct access to Ansible experts, and more. Read more details at the Ansible blog.
 

NEXT VIRTUAL ANSIBLE CONTRIBUTOR SUMMIT: MONDAY, JULY 6TH

The voting is complete, and the majority of contributors who participated have chosen Monday, July 6th as the date for our next Ansible Virtual Contributor Summit, with virtual hackfest days to follow on the 7th and 8th. To sign up or to add agenda items for potential discussion, please go to the Etherpad for the event. 
 

UPCOMING PREVIEW RELEASES FOR ANSIBLE 2.10

The first beta release of Ansible Base 2.10 is currently scheduled for this Friday, May 29th, and nightly builds of Ansible 2.10 will begin on Tuesday, June 2nd. These nightly builds will be an excellent opportunity to begin testing collections and general functionality, and we encourage collection maintainers in particular to use this time to begin validation of their modules and content.

** We’ll be broadcasting loud and clear when the first nightly build is available, along with where and how to get it; stay tuned! **
 

FIFTY K

This week saw the Ansible project roll over a significant milestone, 50,000 commits!

ANSIBLE LINTING WITH GITHUB ACTIONS

Want to make sure that your Ansible content is checked with every GitHub commit? There’s now a GitHub action to run Ansible Lint. Colin McCarthy walks you through the process in his blog post at ansible.com.

 

AN INTRO TO ANSIBLE WITH NETWORK CHUCK

Have friends who need a quick easy-to-follow introduction to Ansible? NetworkChuck has posted a new Ansible video to his YouTube channel with an easy-to-follow tutorial that takes users from installation through the first playbook. 
 

ANSIBLE VIRTUAL MEETUPS

The following virtual meetups are being held in the Ansible community over the next month:

Ansible London: Virtual meetup – 3rd June
Wed, Jun 03 · 6:00 PM GMT+1
https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-London/events/270746783/
 

Ansible in DevOps Torun-Bydgoszcz: #6 Meeting AiDO -> Terraform
Wed, Jun 10 · 5:00 PM GMT+2
https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-in-DevOps-Torun-Bydgoszcz/events/270881163/

We are planning more virtual meetups to reach a broader audience, and we want to hear from you! Have you started using Ansible recently, or are you a long-time user? How has Ansible improved your workflow or scaled up your automation? What are some of the challenges you’ve faced and lessons learned? Share your experience by presenting at a Virtual Ansible Meetup: https://forms.gle/aG5zpVkXDVMHLERX9

You’ll have the option to pre-record the presentation, and be available during the meetup for live Q&A, or deliver the presentation live. We will work with you on the optimal set up, and share with you some cool Ansible swag!
 

FEEDBACK

Have any questions you’d like to ask, or issues you’d like to see covered? Please send us an email to the-bullhorn@redhat.com.

 

 

The Bullhorn

A Newsletter for the Ansible Developer Community

Welcome to The Bullhorn, our newsletter for the Ansible developer community. If you have any questions or content you’d like to share, please reach out to us at the-bullhorn@redhat.com.

THE AWX PROJECT RELEASES 11.2.0

On April 29th, the AWX team released the newest version of AWX, 11.2.0. Notable changes include the use of collection-based plugins by default for versions of Ansible 2.9 and greater, the new ability to monitor stdout in the CLI for running jobs and workflow jobs, enhancements to the Hashicorp Vault credential plugin, and several bugfixes. Read Rebeccah Hunter’s announcement here. For more frequent AWX updates, you can join the AWX project mailing list.

ANSIBLE 101 WITH JEFF GEERLING: EPISODE 7

In the latest video of his Ansible 101 series, Jeff Geerling explores Ansible Galaxy, ansible-lint, Molecule, and testing Ansible roles and playbooks based on content in his bestselling Ansible book, Ansible for DevOps. You can find the full channel of his Ansible videos here. 
 

POLL: DATES FOR NEXT ANSIBLE CONTRIBUTOR SUMMIT

We’re planning our next full-day virtual Ansible Contributor Summit sometime in late June or early July, and we’re looking for feedback on proposed dates. Carol Chen has posted a Doodle poll with options for possible dates; if you’re interested in attending, please fill out the poll so that we know which dates are best for everyone. We will close the poll on Friday, May 22nd.
 

PROOF OF CONCEPT: SERVERLESS ANSIBLE WITH KNATIVE

William Oliveira has built a new proof-of-concept for using Ansible and Knative to create event-driven playbooks. The proof-of-concept is a web application that can execute playbooks on demand and send those events to a Knative Event Broker to trigger other applications. Find the source code on GitHub here. 

 

COMMUNITY METRIC HIGHLIGHT: COMMUNITY.GENERAL COLLECTION

As the Ansible community continues to grow, we rely increasingly on metrics to keep track of our progress towards our goals. Following on from the more general metrics in Issue 1, we've also started to think about what special handling we might need in addition to metrics for all collections. Community.general is one such special case — as the home for most modules in Ansible, it sees a lot of contributors come and go, and content there can run the risk of becoming unmaintained. We need to watch this repository carefully so that we can act as needed.

Below is one graph from the dashboard we're preparing on this. This graph shows the rate of opened and closed issues per week, as well as a simple statistical test to see if the slope is non-zero. Currently both are essentially flat, suggesting opening and closing of issues is balanced. We've already got several graphs on this report, and we'll be adding more in the future.

 

 

ANSIBLE VIRTUAL MEETUPS

The following virtual meetups are being held in the Ansible community over the next month:

Ansible Minneapolis: CyberArk’s integration with Ansible Automation

Thu, May 21 · 6:30 PM CDT

https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-Minneapolis/events/sbqkgrybchbcc/

 

Ansible Northern Virginia: Spring Soiree!

Thu, May 21 · 4:00 PM EDT

https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-NOVA/events/270368639/

 

Ansible Paris: Webinar #1

Thu, May 14 · 11:00 AM GMT+2

https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-Paris/events/270584272/

 

We are planning more virtual meetups to reach a broader audience, and we want to hear from you! Have you started using Ansible recently, or are you a long-time user? How has Ansible improved your workflow or scaled up your automation? What are some of the challenges you’ve faced and lessons learned? Share your experience by presenting at a Virtual Ansible Meetup: https://forms.gle/aG5zpVkXDVMHLERX9

You’ll have the option to pre-record the presentation, and be available during the meetup for live Q&A, or deliver the presentation live. We will work with you on the optimal set up, and share with you some cool Ansible swag!

 

FEEDBACK

Have any questions you’d like to ask, or issues you’d like to see covered? Please send us an email to the-bullhorn@redhat.com.

 

The Bullhorn

A Newsletter for the Ansible Developer Community

Welcome to The Bullhorn, our newsletter for the Ansible developer community. There are a lot of changes happening in Ansible right now, so we thought this would be a good time to start a newsletter to help everyone stay up-to-date.

For now, we’ll probably release a new issue every couple of weeks or so. If you have any particular topics you’d like to see discussed in this newsletter, please reach out to us at gdk@redhat.com.

AN UPDATE ON ANSIBLE 2.10

If you’ve been following the development of Ansible 2.10, you know that we’re splitting out much of the code from the ansible/ansible repository on GitHub into new collections. We discussed the rationale for this change in a couple of blog posts in July of 2019 [1] [2].

For end users, nothing much should change. Ansible 2.10 will contain all of the modules and plug-ins that were present in Ansible 2.9, and playbooks written for Ansible 2.9 should generally work in Ansible 2.10. Users who “pip install ansible” should get the same experience. We expect to have a long beta cycle to help ensure compatibility between 2.9 and 2.10.

Under the hood, though, there’s quite a bit going on for developers to be aware of: 

• Content migration. In March, the Ansible Core development team froze the development tree for ansible/ansible and migrated most of the modules into one of the following repositories:

  • The community.general collection, which will be the new home for most community-written and community-supported content shipped in Ansible, built from a single community.general repository [3], and which will follow largely the same development process as Ansible has followed previously;

  • A set of more specific community collections, including: 

    • The community.networking collection [4], which provides a broad array of community-written and community-supported networking modules;

    • The community.crypto collection [5], a collection of related crypto modules with an active working group;

    • The community.grafana collection [6], a collection of modules to manage Grafana;

    • And various other collections that are managed by members of the Ansible community;

  • Partner collections, which are written, maintained, and supported by Ansible partners, a current list of which can be found here [7].

• The new ansible-base project. Some modules remain in the ansible/ansible repository, which is now the home of the ansible-base project. Ansible-base is the core engine of Ansible itself, plus a small subset of key modules and libraries that are maintained by Red Hat. The ansible-base project is at the heart of everything Ansible does, and the Ansible team at Red Hat will keep a strong focus on maintaining it at a high level of quality and stability. As well as being packaged with Ansible, Ansible-base will now also release separately from Ansible, and will also ship with the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Our current target date for release of ansible-base 2.10 is the end of July 2020. Follow our progress towards the release of ansible-base 2.10 here [8].

• Ansible 2.10 build tooling. Because Ansible 2.10 will be composed from separate collections, we are working on build tools that will assemble those collections into a single pip deliverable. Initial versions of that build code can be found here [9], and we expect to be putting together our first alpha builds of Ansible 2.10 in the coming days. Look for an announcement here on The Bullhorn, on the Ansible developer mailing list, and elsewhere. 

• GitHub redirection work. Now that much of the Ansible source code has moved, it might not always be clear to potential contributors where to submit issues or PRs. We will be working on workflow tools to direct contributors to the new content locations. We will also be working on tooling to make it easy for contributors to re-file existing PRs or issues in the new repositories. Follow the status of our GitHub redirection work here [10].

We’re still quite early in this process, but we’ve made a lot of progress. Assuming things continue to go well, we should be on track for a release of Ansible 2.10 by AnsibleFest in October 2020, or perhaps earlier.

Follow our progress towards the release of Ansible 2.10 here [11] and here [12].
 

ANSIBLE CONTRIBUTOR SUMMIT 

On March 29th, we held our first fully virtual Ansible Contributor Summit. The event was originally scheduled to be an in-person event co-located with FOSS North in Gothenburg, Sweden, but COVID-19 changed our plans.  

Despite our inability to meet in person, the Contributor Summit was a productive and successful event, with almost 50 contributors joining us over the course of the day. You can check out the videos [13] of the livestream event, along with a detailed summary [14] and a full log [15] of the accompanying IRC session. 

On March 30th, we followed the contributor summit with a virtual hackathon, in which we followed up on many of the issues that were discussed. Both a summary [16] and a full log [17] are available for the hackathon as well. 

In the future, we expect to have these virtual contributor summit events roughly once a quarter, which means the next event should happen near the end of June 2020. We will rotate the start times of these sessions to make them more accessible to people spread across the globe. 
 

COMMUNITY METRIC HIGHLIGHT: COLLECTIONS GROWTH 

As the Ansible community continues to grow, we rely increasingly on metrics to keep track of our progress towards our goals.  

One of our key areas of focus is on contributors to collections. As we make the shift to collections, we want to ensure that our contributors are successful in making the switch. We’ve got a dashboard that shows us the progress of each collection in regaining its momentum from its original development in ansible/ansible. Here’s a small sample of that dashboard: 

You can see the full dashboard here [18]. 

FEEDBACK 

Have any questions you’d like to ask, or issues you’d like to see covered? Please send us an email to gdk@redhat.com.

If you know somebody who could benefit from reading this newsletter, please feel free to forward it to them.