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Bullhorn #28

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The Bullhorn

A Newsletter for the Ansible Developer Community Issue #28, 2021-06-11 (Past Issues)

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

ANSIBLE 4.1.0 RELEASED

The Ansible Community team announced the general availability of Ansible 4.1.0 on June 10th. This update contains bugfixes and new, backwards compatible features in the contained collections. The release makes use of Ansible-core-2.11. There may be changes to the playbook language or other backwards incompatibilities. Please see the porting guide for details.

For what's new in this release and how to get it, please see Toshio Kuratomi’s email to the ansible-announce list.

Ansible 5 development begins now. We're tentatively planning to release Ansible 5.0.0 in November 2021, bringing in the Ansible-core-2.12 release.

COMMUNICATION: LIBERA.CHAT IRC NETWORK

Ansible Community has made the decision to move to Libera.Chat IRC network. We are using the same channel names as we did on the Freenode network. Documentation will be updated shortly, and we will share them when ready. From now on, discussions and meetings will take place on Libera.Chat instead of Freenode.

NEW/UPDATED COMMUNITY COLLECTIONS

  • OKD Collection for Ansible - the community.okd collection repository has been moved to its new home under the openshift GitHub organization. All links to its previous home under ansible-collections should automatically redirect.
  • Ansible Community Crypto Collection - community.crypto 1.7.0 has been released, with a bunch of new features and bugfixes.
  • Ansible VMware vSphere Collection - vmware.vmware_rest 2.0.0rc1 has been released. This new branch only support vSphere 7.0.2+ and comes with a new set of modules to manage the vSphere appliances.
  • The Amazon AWS Collection - amazon.aws and Community AWS Collection - community.aws are now only tested on Python 3.6+. Changes that use Python 3 syntax can be made to both collections.
    • The inventory script included in community.aws has been moved to a separate repository. It will no longer be included in community.aws 3.0.0, and will be removed from the community.aws main branch during the 3.0 development cycle.
  • Community General Collection - community.general 2.5.3 and 3.2.0 have been released.
    • All inventory and vault scripts included in community.general have been moved to a separate repository. They will no longer be included in community.general 4.0.0, and will be removed from community.general's main branch soon.
  • Docker Community Collection - community.docker 1.7.0 has been released.
  • Kubernetes Collection for Ansible - kubernetes.core 2.0.0 has been released. This release includes:
    • The migration to kubernetes.core from community.kubernetes including the move to its new repo
    • The openshift client dependency -- the collection now relies solely on the official kubernetes community client library
    • Python2 support has been dropped
    • Several performance improvements including...
    • Introduction of turbo mode to reuse connections to the K8s API service
    • You can now apply multiple templates in one task rather than one task per loop item
    • Improved the resource patch handling including...
    • Only patch existing objects
    • The introduction of k8s_json_patch to better handle JSON patches
    • Many more bugs fixes and small incremental improvements -- see the project CHANGELOG for a complete list.

ANNOUNCING NEW COLLECTION MAINTAINERS

We are happy to announce that, since the Contributor Summit in March 2021, the project has found new maintainers, among others: * Amin Vakil (@aminvakil) and Alexey Znamensky (@russoz) in community.general, and * Jorge Rodriguez (@Jorge-Rodriguez) in community.mysql.

With their participation, each of the above collections now has 3 active maintainers.

They have done an excellent job with hundreds of merged pull requests and a great history of reviews in different repositories. Their contributions are influencing the whole project as they have helped and are helping to shape very important general documents which live in the community-docs repository. These include the quick-start guide, contributing file template, review checklist, maintainer guidelines, and other docs that will help many contributors improve Ansible.

On behalf of the Ansible Community and the Community Team, we'd like to congratulate them on getting commit access, and say THANK YOU!

LOOKING FOR COLLECTION MAINTAINERS/CONTRIBUTORS

The following collections - community.mysql, community.postgresql, and community.proxysql - are looking for new maintainers and contributors! If you are interested, please refer to the corresponding pinned issues linked via the collection names.

REVIEWS AND FEEDBACK WANTED!

  • Requesting review on gRPC connection plugin. This PR will add a new connection plugin for gRPC based communication with network hosts.
  • Requesting review on Platform agnostics network resource manager role for ansible.network collection.
  • Ansible has a new open source, data-centric, container-first, developer-friendly interface called ansible-navigator which will be included in the next Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform release. If you don't mind the bleeding edge, try out the alpha-1 release that was released to PyPI on June 1st. We are looking forward to your feedback, issues, and PRs in the repo. Please help us make this great!
  • If you are using role argument specs in collections, or are trying them out, please provide feedback for the following PRs:
    • Generate role documentation - this PR creates role documentation from role argument specs for the docsite, similarly to plugin and module documentation.
    • Support roles with argument spec - this PR allows antsibull-changelog to auto-detect new roles (it only considers the main entrypoint) in collections.
  • There's a feature request for the Cisco ASA collection to have a dynamic_filter ASA module which can enable Botnet filtering via Cisco dynamic/static DB. Feedback is welcome from the community as to how often you've used the Cisco ASA botnet filtering feature, and if you want the process to be automated via Ansible Cisco ASA module.

COMMUNITY DOCUMENTATION UPDATE

The collection maintainer guidelines have been merged to the work-in-progress community docs. Along with them are other documents that can be used across the collections, such as the review checklist, releasing guidelines, contributing.rst, and quick-start guide. Thanks to everyone who helped out! Feel free to open PRs and share your ideas, as well as refer to the documents from your READMEs, CONTRIBUTING.mds, and so on. When the community docs have settled in a permanent location, we will find and correct all the references in the repositories under the ansible-collections GitHub organization.

CONTENT FROM THE ANSIBLE COMMUNITY

The XLAB Steampunk team has made part of their internal QA tool available to the general public. You can test it out here.

THE ANSIBLE TEAM IS HIRING

Red Hat is hiring several roles to work on Ansible. Please check the job descriptions in the links and apply!

ANSIBLEFEST 2021 CFP

This year's AnsibleFest will be a virtual event, happening on September 29–30, 2021. The call for presentations is now open! Add your voice to the conversation by telling us your automation story - check out the details and submit your proposal here.

ANSIBLE CONTRIBUTOR SUMMIT 2021.06

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Ansible Contributor Summit 2021.06 on June 8, 2021! We are editing the recordings, and will gather the logs/presentations/videos and share them in the Ansible Community wiki shortly. Look out for the Contributor Survey in the coming weeks!

The next Contributor Summit will take place alongside AnsibleFest. The dates are not confirmed yet, but it will be in the week of September 27, 2021. Details to follow!

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.

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