Ansible 2.2.0 RC1 is ready for testing

[James Cammarata]

Hi all, we're very happy to announce that Ansible 2.2.0 ("The Battle of Evermore") RC1 is ready for testing!

This release includes a LOT of new features and improvements:

* Major performance improvements. In many cases, you should see a 2-3x improvement over 2.1/2.0.

* Almost 200 new modules! Some highlights:

  - Lots of new AWS functionality (Lambda, EFS, Red Shift and more)

  - Netapp

  - NXOS

  - Red Hat Atomic

  - docker_network

  - F5 big IP modules

* `include_role` now allows for roles to be executed inline with your other tasks, instead of listing them only in the `roles:` section of your plays (http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/include_role_module.html)

* The `listen` feature for handlers allows for much easier notifications of multiple handlers via a pub/sub mechanism (http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_intro.html#handlers-running-operations-on-change).

* Serial batches can now be specified as a list rather than a single integer value, meaning you can do something like this to scale up serial batches:

  `serial: [1, 5, 10]` # the first batch will be 1 host, 2nd=5 hosts, all other batches will be 10 hosts)

* Windows tasks can now use "async", and can also now use the "environment" option to set environment variables.

* Support for binary modules.

* New become method: `ksu` (Kerberos su).

* New meta option: `end_play`, which allows for early termination of a play without failing.

* Meta tasks now support conditional statements.

And finally, a lot of work has been put into Python 3 support for Ansible running on the controller. We are officially targeting Python 3.5 for support at this time, and most major features should work though YMMV. Because almost every module shipping today was written to also support Python 2.4, be aware that running things via `local_action` or `delegate_to: localhost` will still probably run into errors when running the Ansible controller on Python 3+. 

How do you get it?

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The tar.gz of the release can be found here:

http://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.2.0.0-0.1.rc1.tar.gz

SHA256: 2f10eda8d126e3516e0316badf01287d321b0d4dcf069a8256a17ff4d0246d16

You can also test against the git repository as follows:

$ git clone https://github.com/ansible/ansible.git

$ cd ansible

$ git checkout v2.2.0.0-0.1.rc1

$ git submodule update --init

You can then source our testing script:

$ . hacking/env-setup

or you can build your own .tar.gz (output will be dist/ansible-2.2.0.0.tar.gz):

$ make sdist

If you discover any errors, or if you see any regressions from playbooks which work on 1.9.x and prior, please open a Github issue and be sure to mention you're testing against this release candidate.

Thanks!

James Cammarata

Ansible Lead/Sr. Principal Software Engineer

Ansible by Red Hat

twitter: @thejimic, github: jimi-c