CfgMgmtCamp 2026 discussion (8/12): Instant Ansible-test target updates without announcements

[felixfontein]

As a collection developer/maintainer

Instant Ansible-test target updates without announcements

Latest developments

None that I know of. This wasn’t discussed at CfgMgmtCamp 2026.

Original text

When you use ansible-test integration for integration tests - what many collections are doing -,
you often use container images or VMs (this is limited to some collections using AZP, since you need special access) to run the tests in. If you’re sticking to the default container image, everything is fine.

But if you’re using OS-specific container images, or VMs, you’ll notice that from time to time these are replaced. Until almost two years ago (announcement, discussion), changes were announced, and for a certain amount of time both the old container image/VM and the new one could be used. This allowed collections to take a few days to add the new images to their CI matrix and remove the old ones.

But now this no longer happens. If images are replaced, there is no announcement, and the old image is removed at the same time that the new one is added. So basically from one point to the next your CI matrix turns red, and stays red until you updated it. Adding new targets can take some time, especially if you work on maintaining collections in your spare time and can’t allocate many hours in a row to it.

The main argument has been that this mainly affects devel, and you shouldn’t test against that anyway if you don’t like random surprises. You could use milestone instead. But that one has similar problems, when milestone is bumped. You know these dates in advance, but then suddenly your CI is red and you have to deal with even more changes at the same time.

And that’s not all. The VM images are sometimes also changed for stable branches, in the same manner: no announcement, no overlap between availability of the old and new image. This happened both for RHEL 9.x → RHEL 9.7 and RHEL 10.0 → RHEL 10.1 in the first two weeks of this year.

As an example, when I woke up on January 8th, I noticed the following replacements since the previous evening:

• devel branch:

  • fedora42 VM and container image → fedora43
  • rhel/10.0 VM → rhel/10.1
  • freebsd/13.5 VM → freebsd/15.0
  • alpine3.22 VM and container image → alpine3.23

• stable-2.20 branch:

  • rhel/10.0 VM → rhel/10.1

• stable-2.19 branch:

  • rhel/10.0 VM → rhel/10.1

• stable-2.18 branch:

  • rhel/10.0 VM → rhel/10.1

(The same happened for stable-2.16, but I don’t have that one in CI anymore with VMs.)

It would be great if these changes could be announced and done in two steps (first step: add new platform and use it; second step: remove old platform). This really isn’t much extra work, and heavily improves the life of collection maintainers who use these images in CI.