Ansible 2.6: What’s new for Azure

Ansible 2.6 was recently released and I am excited to share with you what’s new for Azure in Ansible 2.6. In total, four new Azure modules were added in addition to over 17 enhancements to our existing modules. In 2.6 you now have the ability to natively manage:

• Azure Kubernetes Service: Create, update and delete an Azure Kubernetes Service.
• Resource: Create, update, delete or get facts for any Azure resource using the Azure REST API. You can find further details and a tutorial here: Using Azure REST API in Ansible to automate Azure resources.

We published three new tutorials to the Ansible Developer Hub with this release:

• Create and configure AKS clusters: This article shows you how to use Ansible to create and configure an Azure Kubernetes Service cluster.
• Create and configure VMSS: This article shows you how to use Ansible to create and scale out a virtual machine scale set.
• Deploy app to VMSS: This article shows you how to deploy a Java application to an Azure virtual machine scale set (VMSS).

We also made a lot of enhancements to our existing modules enabling a greater range of scenarios for the deployment and management of virtual machines and networking objects. Below you can see the full changelog.

Ansible 2.6 Azure Modules Changelog

azure_rm_common

• Support ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) through ADAL (Azure AD Authentication Library)

azure_rm_virtualnetwork

• Set DNS server IPs in existing virtual network

azure_networking_interface

• Create network interface without NSG attached
• Add network interface to Load Balancer backend pool
• Accept security_group_name parameter when creating a security group
• Create a new NIC associating an existing NSG
• Create a NIC without public IP
• Connect NICs to virtual networks in different resource groups

azure_rm_subnet

• Create a subnet which uses a NSG in another resource group

azure_rm_virtualmachine_scaleset_facts

• Improving VMSS facts response to match azure_virtualmachine_vmss input - Fix crash issue when adding data disk to a VMSS which does not have any data disk before

azure_rm_securitygroup

• Create rules that allow IP address prefixes

azure_rm_loadbalancer

• Create Internal Load Balancers
• Support more SKU options (Basic and Standard) for Load Balancer

azure_vm_virtualmachine

• Create a VM with multi NICs
• Create a VM without public IP

azure_rm_image

• Create an Azure image with tag

azure_rm

• Enable MSI and Azure CLI credential for inventory.

Microsoft and Red Hat engineering teams continue to develop the Azure modules with the Ansible community. Join the GitHub repository to make feature requests, report issues, or contribute.

For more information about the capabilities available, please visit the Ansible on Azure developer hub. We hope you enjoy the updates!