Hello everybody.
Welcome to Ansible Pilot from Luca Berton.
This is the first video of the year, so it’s pretty special.
I would like to touch base with you about the status of the Ansible project, a zeitgeist of the year 2022, and what to expect for the upcoming 2023.
The year 2022 was a very interesting year transitioning from a pandemic to being free from restriction worldwide thanks to vaccination campaigns. The economy reached a rebound bus some unforeseen circumstances, the war in Ukraine, and consequently, the rise of inflation and utility costs slowed down. Many IT enterprises, especially the FANG, the four prominent American technology companies (Meta - formerly Facebook - Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet/Google), put on hold the hiring processes or started some layoffs.
The year 2023 begins with persistently high inflation pushed by high energy prices, a looming recession, leading central banks with high-interest rates, and a general risk-averse environment for businesses.
This is the economic outlook that all organizations worldwide navigate nowadays. We all need to optimize our resources in order to be more productive.
Every IT department faces the challenge of operating more services in less time. Automation is booming. Ansible is becoming prominent in the IT industry, so many job descriptions require the Ansible skill.
We can see clearly on the Red Hat website homepage that Ansible is becoming the third prominent product of the company besides Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
Ansible competitors were historically technologies like Progress Chef and Puppet Enterprise.
Nowadays, Ansible sometimes joins forces or competes with other technologies such as HashiCorp Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Microsoft System Center, JetBrains TeamCity, VMware Aria Automation, Salt Open Source, and Octopus Deploy.
The primary strength of Ansible is the plugin platform. The Ansible plugin allows us to add more modules and functionalities packed in a standard format called collections.
At the moment, 107 Ansible collections expand the basic functionality provided by the “ansible.builtin” namespace shipped with Ansible Core. The additional collections allow us to connect to the primary cloud providers, databases, network devices, storage, log systems, and community contents.
Ansible open source in 2022 and 2023 continues to be delivered in two packages: Core and Community. The Community is a superseded version of Core with some selected additional collections from the whole list.
The first release of 2022 of Ansible Core version 2.11.8 rc1 was on 24th January 2022, while the 2.12 was already released on 8th November 2021, and the latest was 2.14.1 on 6th December 2022, following the common release lifecycle.
The Ansible Engineering team deploys a pre-release nearly one week before any minor or patch release, as it was in 2021.
Significant events were the release of Ansible Core 2.13 and Ansible Core 2.14.
Ansible