Celebrating 200 editions of the Ansible Bullhorn!

[samccann (Sandra McCann)]

Issue #200, 2025-09-12 (Past Issues)

After 5 years, we’re excited to reach 200 editions of our community newsletter, the Ansible Bullhorn. We hope you’ve enjoyed all the news, project updates, and interesting tidbits from the Ansible community over the years. And we’re always looking forward to what is coming in the next edition of the Bullhorn.

For now, though, grab yourself a cup of coffee or tea. Let’s take a moment to celebrate this milestone. Because each edition of the Bullhorn is a testament to what happens when enthusiastic, passionate folks come together. And special thank you to Don Naro (@oranod) for creating this great birthday celebration post!

A brief and bullish history

The very first edition, The Bullhorn #1, was curated by Greg DeKoenigsberg and published on April 23, 2020. It was during Covid and intended to provide a steady stream of updates from the community. The intention was to have a way to help folks feel connected to each other during a time of lockdowns and isolation.

To ensure readers would get the most benefit, we wanted updates to be timely. For instance if you wanted to announce a notable patch in a collection it is better to do that sooner than later. We also wanted to make it easy for folks to easily make brief contributions quickly, without the burden of formality which comes with a curated monthly newsletter. With that in mind, we started the Bullhorn as a set of small updates released every two weeks.

The Bullhorn quickly became the place where polls and governance topics were announced to the community. We realized that getting a fast turnaround was crucial to resolving important decisions that could help the community move forward, so publishing was changed to a weekly schedule starting with The Bullhorn #44 in February 2022. This also helped keep a steady flow of updates going out.

For the first few editions of the Bullhorn, contributors shared their updates by sending an update to a Red Hat email address. Someone on the community team at Red Hat would then round up all the emails before reviewing and editing submissions to put the newsletter together.

It was clear that the Bullhorn had a lot of value for the Ansible community but, like so many other workflows, the process for creating and publishing the Bullhorn was patchy and full of manual overhead. Not only that, but we needed to improve how contributors could share their news. Someone needed to step up and take ownership of the Bullhorn to drive these changes.

As fortune would have it, that person was Carol Chen (@cybette). In an effort to meet people where they work, Carol moved away from the email alias and started a GitHub issue that allowed contributors to share their updates through comments.

Eventually, and in collaboration with Greg Sutcliffe (@gwmngilfen), Carol set up newsbot so that contributors could provide updates as short markdown messages directly in IRC or the social channel on Matrix, making it even easier to quickly announce and share with the rest of the community. We picked Newsbot as it powers the successful This Week in Matrix blog and the aims of that blog align with what we want to achieve, and of course, it’s open source.

Carol also managed the MailChimp subscription through which the Bullhorn was distributed, in addition to the old news wiki (which now just has dead links). For quite some time, Carol looked for options to move away from MailChimp because it was not open and transparent, nor did it provide any meaningful readership statistics.

Initially we intended to migrate all the Bullhorn newsletters to a new community website. Plans changed but everything worked out for the best. After we launched forum.ansible.com in July 2023, we realized it would be the perfect replacement for MailChimp and the old news wiki. So we created the Newsletter category and made it the home of the Bullhorn.

A reflection on the journey

Looking back on the 200 editions of the Bullhorn, you can see much more than just news and updates. You can see the growth of a community, the evolution of Ansible as a technology, and all the countless moments when individual contributors worked together to create something that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Every edition reminds us why we do this work. It gives us a chance to celebrate wins, support each other, and connect. In the words of Carol, who was the driving force behind the Bullhorn for so many years:

“Putting together the Bullhorn newsletter was the highlight of my week, as I got to learn about all the wonderful contributions made by the Ansible Community and share exciting community events that were coming up. Every time I received feedback about how someone benefitted from reading the Bullhorn, it put a smile on my face. Thanks to the community for all the smiles (and more)!”
– Carol

Grabbing the Bullhorn by the numbers

We’ve crunched some numbers to get a view into statistics around contributors and viewers. Let’s take a look.

Since The Bullhorn #100 was published in April 2023 there have been:

• 681 total news entries
• 83 unique contributors

We can see that there is a strong group of regular contributors and the community has maintained consistent participation with 7 contributors per edition on average.

Over the last 100 editions of the Bullhorn, Felix Fontein and Mario Lenz, both from the Ansible steering committee, have contributed a combined total of 134 updates.

While long-term regular contributions are fantastic, we also love to see lots of occasional contributors too. Sustainable engagement means broad community participation. Out of the 83 unique contributors, we have 26 folks who submitted more than five entries, accounting for 69% of our contributors.

The remaining 30% of our contributors:

• 25 contributors with exactly one entry
• 14 contributors with two entries
• 7 contributors with three entries
• 6 contributors with four entries
• 5 contributors with five entries.

These 57 occasional contributors gave us a total of 123 Bullhorn entries. This represents 18.1% of the total entries for the period.

The following graph depicts the distribution of Bullhorn contributors:

This distribution of contributors seems to be a positive indicator of an overall healthy community. You can see activity from a strong set of regular contributors and a “long tail” of new and occasional folks. These “long tail” contributors are a sign of a diverse community, as we want to share news from different parts of the community, especially when we don’t normally hear from them.

In terms of the Bullhorn entries, too, this distribution of contributors most likely results in more balanced content between collection updates, release announcements, tooling improvements, and details about community events.

Let’s dig into some statistics on views, starting with the top three most viewed editions:

• 1,400 views The Bullhorn #143 in June 2024
• 1,100 views The Bullhorn #123 in November 2023
• 840 views The Bullhorn #142 in June 2024

Most Bullhorn editions average close to 300 views.

Having the Bullhorn in the forum also gives us the ability to explore some of the data on views and have some fun!

At the time of writing, there were 6,654 members on the Ansible forum. Out of that total number, 395 members have read 50 or more editions of the Bullhorn; while nearly 640 members of the forum have read more than 10 editions.

We can also tell that 98.9% of folks who read the Bullhorn do so on the same day that it is published! This is a signal for strong engagement. At the same time, this means that around 1.1% of views happen after publication, which suggests that folks who don’t read the Bullhorn immediately are unlikely to read it later. The Bullhorn is intended as a way to communicate “breaking news” for the Ansible community, though, so this pattern doesn’t seem like a problem. It shows we continually provide timely updates to our Community, which is exactly what we wanted.

Where does the Bullhorn go from here?

Looking ahead at the next 100 editions of the Bullhorn, we’d love to hear some of your thoughts and suggestions on how we can increase contributions, enhance how we engage with readers, and improve our content.

Automatically pulling news from other sources

Here are some of the improvements we already made around automation:

• The Ansible Core Team added some automation by rolling out the ansible-announce bot that brings you updates on ansible-core releases (and first appeared in The Bullhorn #136).
• All upcoming events (from the Ansible Events Calendar) are added into each Bullhorn. This includes all Ansible events on Meetup Pro (Forum Discussion).

We don’t want bots to take over contributions, but we hope these entries are useful.

Are there other places where we automate some useful information for our community?

What extra information could we add to make these updates more readable, useful and actionable?

Streamlining the publishing workflow

Perhaps we could automate, at least partially, the Bullhorn publishing workflow? This is largely a manual task that requires some special access in Matrix. However, it would be great to reduce manual burden, share more ownership with the community, and give more folks the ability to contribute by publishing the Bullhorn. These are the general Bullhorn editor steps if you want to see what we do to get each Bullhorn edition published.

Increasing the number of contributors

Speaking of Matrix, when you consider the distribution of contributors, it seems like a logical strategy to target increasing more mid-range contributors. How can we get more occasional contributors to submit content more often? Should do some gamification and add some forum badges?

Easier to submit news

What about lowering the barrier to entry even more to get more occasional contributors? Should we consider allowing submissions via the forum as well as Matrix? For example, post a topic with your news entry and tag it with something like “next-bullhorn” to submit to the next edition?

As a reminder, over the years we’ve experimented with news being submitted via:

• Emailing Ansible Community Team
• Post on a GitHub issue
• Message on IRC
• Message to Newsbot on Matrix

Improving the articles

What works (and more importantly), what doesn’t work for you with The Bullhorn? How can we improve the articles, structure, formatting, and so on, to help you. What Automation needs do you have that you think the Bullhorn could help with?

Social media & promotion

To get the Bullhorn out to a broader audience, should we improve our social media presence? At the moment, we publish to the forum and the r/ansible channel on Reddit.

• Should we start getting out there on Bluesky or Mastodon?
• Are there other places where you look for news and updates where we could add the Bullhorn?
• We realize you are reading this, so how do we reach people that don’t currently know about the Bullhorn?
• Talk to your colleagues and friends that use Ansible.
  • Do they know about The Bullhorn?
  • Where & how would they like to be informed about Ansible news?

Call to action

We’re always looking for community news, project updates, release announcements, and interesting things to share with other open-source automation enthusiasts.

If you have any ideas on improving the Bullhorn, we’d love to hear from you, too. Please reply to this forum post, or share your thoughts with us on Matrix in the social room.

How to subscribe to the Bullhorn

To subscribe to the Bullhorn:

1. Go to the Newsletter category on the Ansible Forum and select the bell icon on the right.

2. Select Watching First Post.

How to share news to the Bullhorn

To share a news item for the Bullhorn, go into the Ansible social room on Matrix at #social:ansible.com. You can then tag newsbot with @newsbot at the start of your update.

An editor will then review and approve your item before including it in the next edition! Don’t worry about if you aren’t sure about the wording, thanks to Matrix you can edit your message afterwards.

And now, on to this week’s news!

This week in Ansible Community

M&T Bank mainframe spotlight

demetri contributed

Checkout our latest spotlight series article that dives into M&T Bank’s Ansible deployment to the mainframe that ‘has become a cornerstone of our DevOps platform’ that has allowed us to ‘develop a more modern, scalable, and efficient solution that serves both our mainframe and distributed environments.’

Mainframe community story

demetri contributed

What is the mainframe doing with Ansible today?

In celebration of the 200th edition of the Bullhorn, we are sharing what Ansible means to the mainframe community, our journey with Ansible on the mainframe and the appreciation we have for the community.

If you have a few minutes, we invite you to read our story.

Read The Docs migration update

Oranod contributed

We’re (still) moving to Read The Docs!

Before the summer holidays, the Ansible community team at Red Hat announced our plans to migrate the docs.ansible.com subdomain to Read The Docs (RTD) hosting in a forum post. These changes should be transparent to you and will not require you to update any bookmarks or do anything differently. It’s still the same great community documentation but better! This move will give us some new features and allow us to improve the documentation experience for you.

We’ve got the legacy-controller-docs.ansible.com domain set up so that the Automation Controller documentation has a new home and remains available after the migration to RTD. And we’re getting close to having all the other pieces in place before we switch things over and point docs.ansible.com at RTD hosting. So stay tuned for more details coming soon.

In the meantime, head over to the forum, read through our post, and let us know in the comments if you have any questions or concerns. Thanks!

Project updates

DevTools

Projects to make it easier to write and test Ansible Content. The ansible-dev-tools metapackage, which includes VScode extension, ansible-creator, ansible-lint, molecule, ansible-navigator, ansible-dev-environment and more! To see what’s planned, and how you can help checkout the foundation-devtools project board

DevTools highlights

Alison Hart shared

Ansible Development Tools highlights and updates!

This has been an eventful year for Ansible development tools (ADT). Releases over the past months have brought enhancements, bugfixes, streamlined development workflows, and improved compatibility across the entire toolchain, as well as some awesome community contributions.

We’ve highlighted these changes in a forum post, which includes specific sections for Molecule and Ansible VS Code extension enhancements.

We’d love to hear your feedback on all these updates to the tools!

Access documentation and links to all the Ansible development tools here.

Collection updates

infra.aap_configuration

Sean Sullivan contributed

infra.aap_configuration 3.5.2 has been released.
This Ansible collection allows for easy interaction with Ansible Automation Platform via Ansible roles using the supported collections modules.
Visit the infra.aap_configuration collection For more information and updates.

cloud.aws_troubleshooting

gomathiselvi contributed

cloud.aws_troubleshooting 4.0.0 has been released! In this release support for certain environment variables has been removed. The versions of ansible-core, ansible-lint, amazon.aws, and community.aws have been updated. Please refer to the changelog for more information.

community.general

Felix Fontein said

community.general 11.3.0 and community.general 10.7.4 have been released with new features, plugins, modules (11.3.0 only), and bugfixes (both).

community.beszel

dbrennand shared

The Ansible community collection community.beszel has released version 0.3.0!

This brand-new collection is ready to use with roles for deploying the Beszel Agent and Hub, as well as modules for gathering information about registered Systems and managing them!

We’re excited to see how the community uses this collection. If you run into issues or have feature ideas, you can open an issue on GitHub. For help or discussion, use the beszel tag on the Ansible forum.

ibm.ibm_zhmc

demetri shared

The latest ibm.ibm_zhmc collection version 1.9.5 is now available.

This release increases the size limit of 2GB for ISO images that can be mounted with the zhmc_partition module using state=mount_iso.

ibm.ibm_zos_cics

demetri contributed

The latest ibm.ibm_zos_cics collection version 2.2.1 is now available.

This release:

• Added new SIT parameters from CICS TS 6.3
• Removed the requests library dependency in order to use the collection.
• Increased the minimum version of xmltodict to 0.15.0

Certified collections

samccann shared

Certified collections updated this week:

• hitachivantara.vspone_block:4.2.0
• purestorage.flashblade:1.21.2
• ibm.ibm_zos_cics:2.2.1
• ansible.security:5.0.0
• datadog.dd:6.2.0
• check_point.mgmt:6.5.0
• cisco.intersight:2.3.0

Help wanted

docs.ansible.com redesign feedback

Oranod said

A new look for docs.ansible.com!

Before we point the subdomain to Read The Docs hosting, it’s a good opportunity to port over all the content from the ansible/docsite landing pages: Add docsite templates by oraNod · Pull Request #475 · ansible-community/community-website · GitHub

This will combine the great design of the community website with the content journey based approach to the docsite along with some other benefits.

Please feel free to leave feedback on the pull request above or reply to the forum post that provides more detail.

Return documentation fragments discussion

bcoca said

Ansible 2.20 adds support for documentation fragments for return values. We need your feedback on the options for handling backward compatibility issues. See this forum post for details.

AI support for Ansible development

gundalow shared

How AI can be used to help the Ansible Community & Development.
We’ve started a new Forum discussion to help generate some ideas on how AI can support the Ansible Development. As we have a diverse community, where many of you are involved in other projects, we are interested in hearing what has worked.

Some ideas include, of how we could use AI include:

• Improved testing
• Improving the documentation via AI
• Improving the documentation to allow LLMs to be better trained
• For those that use Claude AI, there is a PR to add CLAUDE.md to help with Ansible Core development.
• To improve training, we are looking at adopting LLM.txt file for latest package docs ansible/ansible-documentation#3056

We are discussing all the above in this forum post, so help us shape the direction you’d like us to go in to.

Proposals - discuss and vote!

Ansible 13 roadmap vote

mariolenz shared

There is now a vote open on the Ansible 13 roadmap.

Community events and meetups

Ansible Virtual Meetup announcement

gundalow contributed

The first Ansible Virtual Meetup takes place on Thursday, October 2, 2025.
So join us online to find out more about these topics:

Next-Gen Ansible Development Tools in Windows, macOS or Linux!

by Leo Gallego

In this session, we’ll show you how to speed up your automation content creation using the all-new Ansible Development Tools, now available on any OS—Windows, macOS, or Linux! We’ll introduce a streamlined, Dev Container approach for VS Code that accelerates your workflow—from installing all the tools to initializing a collection, linting, testing with Molecule, and deploying with ansible-navigator and ansible-builder. Whether you’re a seasoned pro looking for shortcuts or a beginner wanting to build a solid foundation, you’ll discover new ways and best practices to develop and deploy Ansible content faster than ever.

A Love Letter to Ansible Core 2.19

by Matt “nitzmahone” Davis

Nervous about upgrading to Ansible Core 2.19? Learn how the revamped template engine and error handling in Ansible’s latest release will make your life easier from a self-proclaimed Ansible lover.

Enhanced Module Debugging with Ansible

by Jordan Borean

This session will explore the new debugging capabilities for Ansible modules, covering Python support introduced in Ansible Core 2.19 and upcoming PowerShell support in Ansible Core 2.20 and beyond. We’ll walk through how these modules can be debugged directly on remote hosts without additional setup or file transfers. Attendees will see how to connect from editors like PyCharm or VS Code to step through code live, making troubleshooting faster and more intuitive.

• RSVP via your local group Ansible on Meetup Pro or the Ansible Virtual Meetup group if there isn’t a city group close to you
• Join the discussion on how we can improve our events
• The Ansible Forum’s Calendar shows all upcoming events

As a global community, this first event might not be at the best time for you, we will rotate our event times to make them more accessible, especially to our community in APAC.

Ansible India meetup recap

OP (ompragash) contributed

The Ansible community is active worldwide Last Saturday, the India community came together in Bangalore for a meetup full of learning, conversations, and new connections.
What happened

• Sessions on AI in IT operations, event-driven Ansible, and real-time telemetry
• People joined with curiosity and walked away with fresh ideas
  Big thanks to
• Deepak Mishra (Prodevans) for showing how AI is reshaping IT automation
• Ranabir Chakraborty (IBM) for breaking down event-driven Ansible in action
• Debabrata (Parseable) for diving into streaming Ansible telemetry
• Prodevans Technologies for hosting us in Bangalore
  Want to contribute?

If you’re in India and want to be part of future meetups, join Ansible India on Meetup or follow updates on the Ansible Community Forum.
If you’d like to speak or support a future meetup, fill out this form: Ansible India - Call for Papers

Major new releases

Ansible-Core

The ansible-core package contains the base engine and a small subset of modules and plugins. To see what’s planned for the next release, look at the ansible-core roadmaps.

ansible-core 2.19.2

ansible-announce contributed

New Release: ansible-core v2.19.2 - New Release: ansible-core v2.19.2

ansible-core 2.18.9

ansible-announce contributed

New Release: ansible-core v2.18.9 - New Release: ansible-core v2.18.9

ansible-core 2.17.4

ansible-announce contributed

New Release: ansible-core v2.17.14 - New Release: ansible-core v2.17.14

Ansible Community Package

The Ansible package includes ansible-core and is a batteries-included package that provides a curated set of Ansible collections. See the Ansible roadmaps for future release plans.

Ansible 12.0.0

mariolenz contributed

Ansible 12.0.0 package is here!
Release announcement: Ansible community package 12.0.0
You can install it by running the following command:

python3 -m pip install ansible==12.0.0 --user

Check Release Notes and Ansible 12 Porting Guide for more details!

Ansible 11.10.0

Felix Fontein contributed

Ansible 11.10.0 package is here!
Release announcement: Ansible community package 11.10.0
You can install it by running the following command:

python3 -m pip install ansible==11.10.0 --user

Check Release Notes (ansible-build-data/11/CHANGELOG-v11.md at 11.10.0 · ansible-community/ansible-build-data · GitHub) and Ansible 11 Porting Guide (Ansible 11 Porting Guide — Ansible Community Documentation) for more details!

cloud.common removal from Ansible

Felix Fontein said

cloud.common has been removed from Ansible 12 since it is fundamentally incompatible with ansible-core 2.19. The only collection that depends on it, vmware.vmware_rest, dropped the dependency on cloud.common in its 4.9.0 release, which will be contained in Ansible 12.

Other events and releases

samccann contributed

upcoming events:

• 2025-09-23, Announcing Our Official Code Freeze Schedule & Process
• 2025-09-25, AWS Community Meeting
• 2025-10-02, Ansible-London: Ansible Virtual Meetup: October 2025 [2025-10-02]
• 2025-10-02, AAP Config as Code Office Hours - First Thursday of Every Month
• 2025-10-08, Ansible for IBM Z community meeting
• 2025-10-09, Ansible-London: Ansible London – Thursday 9th October 2025 [2025-10-09]
• 2025-10-09, Red Hat Summit: Connect 2025 London
• 2025-10-14, AWX Community Meeting
• 2025-10-15, CFP close for CfgMgmtCamp 2026
• 2025-11-05, Ansible-Barcelona: A Deep Dive into Configuration as Code using Ansible’s community aap_configurati [2025-11-05]
• 2025-12-01, Ansible @ AWS: re:invent - December 2025
• 2026-02-02, CfgMgmtCamp 2026
• Every Tuesday @11AM ET, Documentation Working Group
• Every Thursday @13:00 UTC, Network Working Group

Use the Ansible Forum to see other events and releases.

Join the Ansible community

Looking for ways to get involved? See how can I help for some ideas!

You can find easy issues in collections and other projects for code or documentation contributions.

That’s all for now!

Have any questions you’d like to ask, or issues you’d like to see covered? Please ask in #social:ansible.com! See you next time!

So what are you looking forward to next?

We are looking forward to hearing your ideas!