=========== Ansible 2.7

.. contents:: Topics

Release Schedule

Expected

• 2018-08-23 Core Freeze (Engine and Core Modules/Plugins)
• 2018-08-23 Alpha Release 1
• 2018-08-30 Community Freeze (Non-Core Modules/Plugins)
• 2018-08-30 Beta Release 1
• 2018-09-06 Release Candidate 1 (If needed)
• 2018-09-13 Release Candidate 2 (If needed)
• 2018-09-20 Release Candidate 3 (If needed)
• 2018-09-27 Release Candidate 4 (If needed)
• 2018-10-04 General Availability

Release Manager

Toshio Kuratomi (IRC: abadger1999; GitHub: @abadger)

Cleaning Duty

• Drop Py2.6 for controllers Docs PR #42971 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/42971>_ and issue #42972 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/42972>_
• Remove dependency on simplejson issue #42761 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/42761>_

Engine Improvements

• Performance improvement invoking Python modules pr #41749 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41749>_
• Jinja native types will allow for users to render a Python native type. pr #32738 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/32738>_

Core Modules

• Include feature changes and improvements

  • Create new argument apply that will allow for included tasks to inherit explicitly provided attributes. pr #39236 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/39236>_
  • Create "private" functionality for allowing vars/default to be exposed outside of roles. pr #41330 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41330>_

• Provide a parameter for the template module to output to different encoding formats pr #42171 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/42171>_

• reboot module for Linux hosts (@samdoran) pr #35205 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/35205>_

Cloud Modules

General

• Cloud auth plugin proposal #24 <https://github.com/ansible/proposals/issues/24>_

AWS

• Inventory plugin for RDS pr #41919 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41919>_
• Count support for ec2_instance
• aws_eks module pr #41183 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41183>_
• Cloudformation stack sets support (PR#41669 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41669>_)
• RDS instance and snapshot modules pr #39994 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/39994>_ pr #43789 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/43789>_
• Diff mode improvements for cloud modules pr #44533 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44533>_

Azure

• Azure inventory plugin issue #42769 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/42769>__

Network

General

• Refactor the APIs in cliconf (issue #39056 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/39056>) and netconf (issue #39160 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/39160>) plugins so that they have a uniform signature across supported network platforms. done (PR #41846 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41846>) (PR #43643 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/43643>) (PR #43837 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/43837>) (PR #43203 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/43203>) (PR #42300 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/42300>) (PR #44157 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44157>)

Modules

• New cli_config module issue #39228 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/39228>_ done PR #42413 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/42413>_.
• New cli_command module issue #39284 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/39284>_
• Refactor netconf_config module to add additional functionality. done proposal #104 <https://github.com/ansible/proposals/issues/104>_ (PR #44379 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44379>_)

Windows

General

• Added new connection plugin that uses PSRP as the connection protocol pr #41729 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41729>__

Modules

• Revamp Chocolatey to fix bugs and support offline installation pr #43013 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/43013>_.

• Add Chocolatey modules that can manage the following Chocolatey features

  • Sources <https://chocolatey.org/docs/commands-sources>_ pr #42790 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/42790>_
  • Features <https://chocolatey.org/docs/chocolatey-configuration#features>_ pr #42848 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/42848>_
  • Config <https://chocolatey.org/docs/chocolatey-configuration#config-settings>_ pr #42915 <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/42915>_