Use the Source, Luke - What's Coming Up in Ansible v2

This article explores Ansible v2, a significant refactoring of the infrastructure automation tool. Rather than a complete rewrite, v2 focused on addressing technical debt accumulated during rapid development while maintaining 100% playbook compatibility.

Ansible v2 introduced execution strategies, allowing users to customize how tasks are processed across multiple hosts. The linear strategy maintains traditional behavior where all hosts complete one task before moving to the next. The free strategy enables independent task execution per host, potentially improving performance when tasks have variable completion times.

Another key addition was the blocks feature, providing try/except/finally error handling capabilities within playbooks. This allows users to define rescue and always sections that execute conditionally or unconditionally following block execution.

The article notes that v2 restored the include with functionality, allowing parameterized playbook inclusion that had been deprecated in version 1.5. Additionally, improved error detection provided clearer feedback about syntax issues, including specific line and column information rather than vague error messages.

Ongoing work toward Python 3 compatibility was observed, though the codebase showed signs of not being regularly tested on Python 3 at that time.