Ansible 2.5 was released last month.

If you didn’t read/hear about it, you should first read the ansible 2.5 release notes, ansible 2.5 changelog, and the ansible 2.5 porting guide.

Here is what I like and don’t like about this release:

• Each module documentation is far more readable. Look at the stat module in 2.5 vs its documentation in 2.4 .
• The module index documentation is far harder to automatically search. That’s a big nuisance if you know your modules and want to quickly search for modules parameters for example.
• While this isn’t shown up in the release notes, we finally have an etcd module in ansible, for etcd3. The etcd2 module is still in the works, so is its lookup.
• I do not have a strong opinion about using loop: vs with_. I just do not like the fact I will have to do a grep and replace for no foreseeable reason. It\’s replacing one evil with another. Same goes for replacing the pipe (|) with [is]{.title-ref} for the conditions (Although I agree that the latter is more readable).
• I like the namespace ansible_facts. In fact (pun intended), I prefer using namespacing in many places. I even suggested using this mechanism in openstack-ansible for automatic variable loading in test environment in a test or required namespace.
• The ansible config lookup might be interesting in the future.
• We now have new modules for InfluxDB, and grafana.
• A netns module was introduced, to have basic functionality of creation/deletion of namespaces.
• An interesting package_facts module has been introduced. It automatically registers the list of packages installed on the host in the host vars, under the ansible_facts namespace. Similarily, you can use the service_facts module to know the current state of a service.
• A vdo module was added. If you want to know more about it, check out this page for VDO install, and for checking the VDO benefits.

I’d like to add a big thanks to ricardocarillocruz, gundalow, and bcoca for their help on irc!