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# Ansible 2.5

Core Engine Freeze and Module Freeze: 22 January 2018

Core and Curated Module Freeze: 22 January 2018

Community Module Freeze: 7 February 2018

Release Candidate 1 will be 21 February, 2018

Target: March 2018

Service Release schedule: every 2-3 weeks

Topics

- Ansible 2.5
  - Release Manager
  - Engine improvements
  - Ansible-Config
  - Inventory
  - Facts
  - Static Loop Keyword
  - Vault
  - Runtime Check on Modules for Blacklisting
  - Windows
  - General Cloud
  - AWS
  - Azure
  - Network Roadmap
  - Documentation
  - Contributor Quality of Life

## Release Manager

Matt Davis (IRC/GitHub: @nitzmahone)

## Engine improvements

- Assemble module improvements - assemble just skips when in check mode, it should be able to test if there is a difference and changed=true/false. - The same with diff, it should work as template modules does
- Handle Password reset prompts cleaner
- Tasks stats for rescues and ignores
- Normalize temp dir usage across all subsystems
- Add option to set playbook dir for adhoc, inventory and console to allow for ‘relative path loading’

## Ansible-Config

- Extend config to more plugin types and update plugins to support the new config

## Inventory

- ansible-inventory option to output group variable assignment and data (–export)
- Create inventory plugins for: - aws

## Facts

- Namespacing fact variables (via a config option) implemented in ansible/ansible PR #18445. Proposal found in ansible/proposals issue #17.
- Make fact collectors and gather_subset specs finer grained
- Eliminate unneeded deps between fact collectors
- Allow fact collectors to indicate if they need information from another fact collector to be gathered first.

## Static Loop Keyword

- A simpler altenative to `with_`, `loop:` only takes a list
- Remove complexity from loops, lookups are still available to users
- Less confusing having a static directive vs a one that is dynamic depending on plugins loaded.

## Vault

- Vault secrets client inc new ‘keyring’ client

## Runtime Check on Modules for Blacklisting

- Filter on things like “supported_by” in module metadata
- Provide users with an option of “warning, error or allow/ignore”
- Configurable via ansible.cfg and environment variable

## Windows

- Implement gather_subset on Windows facts
- Fix Windows async + become to allow them to work together
- Implement Windows become flags for controlling various modes (done) - logontype - elevation behavior
- Convert win_updates to action plugin for auto reboot and extra features (done)
- Spike out changing the connection over to PSRP instead of WSMV (done- it’s possible)
- Module updates
  - win_updates (done)
    - Fix win_updates to detect (or request) become
    - Add whitelist/blacklist features to win_updates
  - win_dsc further improvements (done)

## General Cloud

- Make multi-cloud provisioning easier
- Diff mode will output provisioning task results of ansible-playbook runs
- Terraform module

## AWS

- Focus on pull requests for various modules
- Triage existing merges for modules
- Module work
  - ec2_instance
  - ec2_vpc: Allow the addition of secondary IPv4 CIDRS to existing VPCs.
  - AWS Network Load Balancer support (NLB module, ASG support, etc)
  - rds_instance

## Azure

- Azure CLI auth (done)
- Fix Azure module results to have “high-level” output instead of raw REST API dictionary (partial, more to come in 2.6)
- Deprecate Azure automatic storage accounts in azure_rm_virtualmachine (breaks on Azure Stack, punted until AS supports managed disks)

## Network Roadmap

- Refactor common network shared code into package (done)
- Convert various nxos modules to leverage declarative intent (done)
- Refactor various modules to leverage the cliconf plugin (done)
- Add various missing declarative modules for supported platforms and functions (done)
- Implement a feature that handles platform differences and feature unavailability (done)
- netconf-config.py should provide control for deployment strategy
- Create netconf connection plugin (done)
- Create netconf fact module
- Turn network_cli into a usable connection type (done)
- Implements jsonrpc message passing for ansible-connection (done)
- Improve logging for ansible-connection (done)
- Improve stdout output for failures whilst using persistent connection (done)
- Create IOS-XR NetConf Plugin and refactor iosxr modules to leverage netconf plugin (done)
- Refactor junos modules to use netconf plugin (done)
- Filters: Add a filter to convert XML response from a network device to JSON object (done)

## Documentation

- Extend documentation to more plugins
- Document vault-password-client scripts.
- Network Documentation
  - New landing page (to replace intro_networking) (done)
  - Platform specific guides (done)
  - Walk through: Getting Started (done)
  - Networking and `become` (done)
  - Best practice (done)

## Contributor Quality of Life

- Finish PSScriptAnalyer integration with ansible-test (for enforcing Powershell style) (done)
- Resolve issues requiring skipping of some integration tests on Python 3.