Ansible Collections – More clarity and easier sharing in Ansible

Ansible is the fastest-growing configuration management tool these days. This has also created a steadily growing community. Due to the simple architecture and the resulting easy extensibility, more and more companies and private persons provide their roles, modules and playbooks for their products and projects.

The Ansible Core project now has a four-digit number of open pull requests and issues on Github. This has become confusing, not only from Red Hat’s perspective.

For more common uses of Ansible – for example, installing the Docker Daemons or the apache web server – Red Hat created Ansible Galaxy some time ago: A place where members of the community provide generic roles for free use. Thus the wheel does not have to be reinvented every time. The community develops not only roles but also modules and other plugins for sometimes very special cases. To provide more structure and better community participation in the Ansible Project, Red Hat has created Ansible Collections: These are product or project-specific collections of playbooks, roles, modules, and plug-ins. As before, these roles are provided via the Ansible Galaxy. The introduction of collections gives companies or projects more control over the Ansible Code they provide themselves. This allows you to bring your own modules or plugins upstream faster: the pull requests are less likely to slip down the list or be forgotten. Once merged, you no longer have to wait for the next release of Ansible, but can simply include the latest version of your collection. At the same time, the Ansible Galaxy maintains the visibility of the collection. Red Hat has taken the first step in this direction by creating collections of projects. These are also maintained by official bodies. These include Ansible Tower, Amazon AWS, and Red Hat Satellite. The Ansible Modules, which we use and actively develop for our orcharhino are now also available as a collection.