Originally reported by eWEEK. Quotes are attributed to Justin Nemmers, General Manager of Ansible at Red Hat, as of the original publication date of August 2018.
Overview
Red Hat released Ansible Engine 2.6 on July 17, 2018, delivering a range of enhancements focused on hybrid and multicloud automation, expanded network device support, deeper VMware integration, and an upgraded Ansible Galaxy community repository. The release continued Red Hat’s investment in Ansible since its acquisition of the project in October 2015.
Multicloud Automation Improvements
A central theme of Ansible Engine 2.6 is making it easier to automate workloads that span multiple cloud providers. According to Justin Nemmers, General Manager of Ansible at Red Hat:
“One of the highlights is the ability to pull native facts from additional AWS and Azure cloud services.”
Prior to 2.6, gathering facts from services such as AWS RDS instances or Azure generic resources was possible but required additional manual steps from the operator. Ansible Engine 2.6 streamlines this process with new modules that retrieve cloud-native facts directly, reducing the amount of custom scripting required in multicloud playbooks.
Expanded VMware Support
Ansible Engine 2.6 extended its VMware hypervisor and cloud environment support significantly. Between the 2.5 and 2.6 releases, Red Hat added 26 modules specifically targeting VMware infrastructure automation. These modules cover:
- Tag management and fact gathering for VMware resources
- Deployment and lifecycle management of virtual machines
- Network and configuration management within VMware-based environments
- Seamless automation of VMware Cloud on AWS, enabling teams to manage both on-premises and cloud infrastructure from a single Ansible workflow
The addition of these modules reflects a growing customer need to treat on-premises VMware infrastructure and public cloud resources as a single, unified automation target rather than managing them through separate toolchains.
Network Automation
Network automation remains a core pillar of the Ansible platform. Ansible Engine 2.6 includes vendor-agnostic modules and supported integrations for the following networking platforms:
- Arista – EOS
- Cisco – IOS, IOS XR, NX-OS
- Juniper – JunOS
- Open vSwitch
- VyOS
These integrations use a common language for network control, allowing teams to write playbooks that work consistently across heterogeneous network environments. Red Hat also introduced a role-based approach to network automation, enabling the distribution of Ansible Roles that address specific network use cases in a vendor-agnostic way.
An Ansible Role is a structured, portable Playbook format that makes reusable automation content easier to share and apply across different environments. Nemmers described the full network automation stack as:
“The Ansible Network Automation offering includes Ansible Tower and Ansible Engine, providing customers everything they need to automate their network environments at scale.”
In this model, Ansible Engine handles the execution of automation tasks directly against network devices, while Ansible Tower provides the management layer — including role-based access control, scheduling, and audit logging — needed to scale network automation across a large IT organization.
Ansible Galaxy 3.0
Alongside the Engine 2.6 release, Red Hat shipped Ansible Galaxy 3.0. Ansible Galaxy is the public-facing repository where community members and Red Hat partners publish Ansible Roles for others to consume and reuse.
Key changes in Galaxy 3.0 included:
- Improved user interface – A redesigned front end to make browsing and discovering Roles more intuitive
- Modernized code base – Internal refactoring to improve maintainability and performance
- Containerized infrastructure – The Galaxy platform itself was migrated to run on Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated
- OpenShift Ansible Broker support – New capability to define and distribute multi-container services on Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated using Ansible Automation
The OpenShift Ansible Broker integration allows platform teams to package complex, multi-container application deployments as Ansible content and make them available through Galaxy, further connecting the automation and container orchestration ecosystems.
Windows Environment Support
Ansible Engine 2.6 also included improvements to Microsoft Windows support. While the original source material does not enumerate specific Windows modules added in this release, Windows environment support was cited as one of the areas receiving focused attention in the 2.6 update, reflecting the heterogeneous nature of enterprise IT estates that Ansible targets.
What This Means for DevOps Teams
Ansible Engine 2.6 addresses several practical pain points for DevOps and infrastructure teams operating in modern hybrid environments:
- Reduced glue code – Native cloud fact-gathering modules eliminate custom scripts previously needed to collect resource information from AWS and Azure.
- Unified VMware and cloud management – The 26 new VMware modules allow a single automation workflow to span on-premises vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS.
- Vendor-agnostic network automation – A common module language across Arista, Cisco, Juniper and open-source networking platforms reduces the need for platform-specific tooling.
- Improved content sharing – Galaxy 3.0 makes it easier for teams to discover, publish and consume reusable Ansible Roles, accelerating automation adoption across an organization.
Nemmers summarized the broader vision: “Ansible is more than just a really great automation platform. It’s a killer IT productivity tool — and one that can help IT orgs drive their organizational culture in open, collaborative and otherwise positive ways, which really is a must in order to succeed with their digital transformation initiatives.”