Red Hat Inc. has updated its recently acquired Ansible technology, launching a new version that comes with enhanced support for Docker containers and also Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

Ansible was only acquired by Red Hat in October of last year, and the new Ansible 2.1 update is actually the second new version of the DevOps IT automation technology since then. Ansible 2.0 was released last January, with a cleaner code architecture, but today’s release offers a lot more practical functionality.

The Azure-related updates include support for Azure Resource Manager, which uses RBACs and templates to deploy resources for applications consistently and repeatably. It’s something that Ansible might do by itself, so it makes sense to leverage Azure’s methods.

In addition, with Windows, Ansible can now manage many other parts of the OS, for example Windows file sharing and the firewall. It can also use NTLM directly to manage machines joined to a domain, instead of doing so through Kerberos. It’s also easier to script workflows that require restarting a system, thanks to a new action called win_reboot.

The other big addition is enhanced support for Docker containers, an area where Red Hat itself is heavily invested. Existing Docker modules have been rewritten, and a new docker_service module makes it possible for Docker Compose to be embedded in Ansible playbooks. What this means is that Ansible now has better control over the deployment infrastructure that runs containers, and it can also interface more closely with how containers are built and managed.

Last but not least, Ansible 2.1 gains networking automation for using the technology to control networking platforms such as those offered by Cisco Systems Inc., Arista Networks Inc., and OpenSwitch.

Ansible 2.1 is now available on GitHub, PyPi and package manager for most supported Linux distributions.

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