This is the second in a loose sequence of articles looking at new features in Ansible 2.0. In the previous article I looked at the Docker connection driver. In this article, I would like to provide an overview of the new-and-much-improved suite of modules for interacting with an OpenStack environment, and provide a few examples of their use.

In versions of Ansible prior to 2.0, there was a small collection of OpenStack modules. There was the minimum necessary to boot a Nova instance:

As the release of Ansible 2.0 draws closer, I’d like to take a look at some of the new features that are coming down the pipe. In this post, we’ll look at the docker connection driver.

A “connection driver” is the mechanism by which Ansible connects to your target hosts. These days it uses ssh by default (which relies on the OpenSSH command line client for connectivity), and it also offers the Paramiko library as an alternative ssh implementation (this was in fact the default driver in earlier versions of Ansible). Alternative drivers offered by recent versions of ansible included the winrm driver, for accessing Windows hosts, the fireball driver, a (deprecated) driver that used 0mq for communication, and jail, a driver for connecting to FreeBSD jails.