Recently, the Ansible Community recently released version 2.4 of their open source automation engine. Ansible 2.4 is available for installation in both Fedora 25, and Fedora 26 — and is also available for pre-release versions of Fedora 27. Ansible is a configuration management and application deployment tool that allows system administrators and software engineers to automate the setting up and deployment of systems and applications.
This new update to Ansible provides a wide range of new features, bugfixes and enhancements, including:
Ansible 2.4 Playbook Import feature
One of the exciting new features in 2.4 is the ability to import playbooks from inside a master playbook. Items in the imported playbook are run in the order they are listed. The new importing feature helps the crafting of playbooks for maximum reuseability. More details of the changes in this area are available in the Ansible Documentation.
Inventory Improvements in Ansible 2.4
Ansible can configure and control multiple systems at the same time using the Ansible inventories. Ansible 2.4 improves inventories, with the addition of plugins, the ability to specify more than one inventory file, and much more.
Erik S
The bump from Ansible 2.3 -> 2.4 breaks the ec2_group module for those who are using python2-boto. (And it’s not as simple as just upgrading to python2-boto3; that breaks other things.)
It would be ideal if there were a dnf(8) downgrade path back to Ansible 2.3. Instead, following the bump to Ansible 2.4, the highest available downgrade version is Ansible 2.1. (Downgrading to Ansible 2.1 breaks still other things. :))
Erik S
In the event anyone else was bitten by this on Fedora 25 or 26: I resolved it by installing python2-boto-2 and python2-boto3 side by side. Ansible appears to be intelligent enough to select the right boto library for the module he’s using.