Today, the Ansible Community is pleased to announce the general availability of Ansible Project 2.4, the latest release of the leading, simple, powerful, and agentless open source IT automation framework. The upstream Ansible project is one of the world’s most popular open source IT automation technologies, with nearly 3,000 unique contributors, more than 32,000 commits to the upstream Ansible open source project, and a user base that spans industries and the globe.¹ Using Ansible automation, developers and IT operations teams can more easily and quickly deploy IT services, applications and environments, enabling them to remove barriers between IT teams by automating routine activities.

The latest version is designed to enable administrators and Playbook authors finer-grained control over their Ansible workloads. New features and enhancements help organizations to:

• Modernize systems with:
  • Support for Python 3  
  • Configuration that is now YAML-based
• Organize workloads through:
  • New Inventory Plugin System, allowing for multiple inventories to be supplied, as well as the ability for inventories to leverage the cache plugin.
  • Significant updates to fact gathering and fact management
  • ansible_group_priority variable, which controls merge order of Group var data.
  • New order play level keyword, enabling users to change the order which Ansible processes hosts when dispatching tasks.
  • Vault Passwords, Playbooks that use multiple roles can use a different vault password per team/role
• Extend automation with support for popular new modules:
  • AWS
  • Azure
  • Cloudengine
  • GCP
  • F5
  • Windows

Ansible 2.4 also includes new updates specific to network automation, including declarative intent. Additionally, with Ansible 2.4 the number of supported networking platforms has grown to 33 and the total networking module count is now 463.

Ansible 2.4 is now available in the following stable branch via GitHub. 

Additionally, Ansible 2.4 is now also available for the first time as a supported offering, Ansible Engine. With Ansible Engine, organizations can access the tools and innovations available from the underlying technology in a hardened, enterprise-grade manner.

¹ https://github.com/ansible/ansible as of 9.18.17