# Ansible 2.7

Topics

- Ansible 2.7
  - Release Schedule
    - Expected
  - Release Manager
  - Cleaning Duty
  - Engine Improvements
  - Core Modules
  - Cloud Modules
    - General
    - AWS
    - Azure
  - Network
    - General
    - Modules
  - Windows
    - General
    - Modules

## Release Schedule

### Expected

- 2018-08-23 Core Freeze (Engine and Core Modules/Plugins)
- 2018-08-23 Alpha Release 1
- 2018-08-30 Community Freeze (Non-Core Modules/Plugins)
- 2018-08-30 Beta Release 1
- 2018-09-06 Release Candidate 1 (If needed)
- 2018-09-13 Release Candidate 2 (If needed)
- 2018-09-20 Release Candidate 3 (If needed)
- 2018-09-27 Release Candidate 4 (If needed)
- 2018-10-04 General Availability

## Release Manager

Toshio Kuratomi (IRC: abadger1999; GitHub: @abadger)

## Cleaning Duty

- Drop Py2.6 for controllers Docs PR #42971 and issue #42972
- Remove dependency on simplejson issue #42761

## Engine Improvements

- Performance improvement invoking Python modules pr #41749
- Jinja native types will allow for users to render a Python native type. pr #32738

## Core Modules

- Include feature changes and improvements
  - Create new argument `apply` that will allow for included tasks to inherit explicitly provided attributes. pr #39236
  - Create “private” functionality for allowing vars/default to be exposed outside of roles. pr #41330
- Provide a parameter for the `template` module to output to different encoding formats pr #42171
- `reboot` module for Linux hosts (@samdoran) pr #35205

## Cloud Modules

### General

- Cloud auth plugin proposal #24

### AWS

- Inventory plugin for RDS pr #41919
- Count support for ec2_instance
- aws_eks module pr #41183
- Cloudformation stack sets support (PR#41669)
- RDS instance and snapshot modules pr #39994 pr #43789
- Diff mode improvements for cloud modules pr #44533

### Azure

- Azure inventory plugin issue #42769

## Network

### General

- Refactor the APIs in cliconf (issue #39056) and netconf (issue #39160) plugins so that they have a uniform signature across supported network platforms. done (PR #41846) (PR #43643) (PR #43837) (PR #43203) (PR #42300) (PR #44157)

### Modules

- New `cli_config` module issue #39228 done PR #42413.
- New `cli_command` module issue #39284
- Refactor `netconf_config` module to add additional functionality. done proposal #104 (PR #44379)

## Windows

### General

- Added new connection plugin that uses PSRP as the connection protocol pr #41729

### Modules

- Revamp Chocolatey to fix bugs and support offline installation pr #43013.

- Add Chocolatey modules that can manage the following Chocolatey features

  > - Sources pr #42790
  > - Features pr #42848
  > - Config pr #42915