Goodbye 2025 and cheers to 2026!

News & Announcements Blog
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Hello folks,

As we wrap up 2025, let’s take a moment to celebrate our incredible Ansible community and the things we have achieved this year. 2025 has indeed been quite an eventful year for us.

We had a few structural changes, successful initiatives, and of course a lot of open conversation in the Ansible Forum. This is the time to celebrate our wins, evaluate our mistakes and lay out a plan for 2026.

Ansible Community Highlights on 2025

Welcoming a new release manager Release Manager working group

We welcomed Tray Keller (Github: traytorous) to the Ansible release-management working group. He started with successfully shadowing the releases and then began releasing Ansible as the Release Manager. Going a step ahead, we started a Mentorship program for the new release managers (the first time in Ansible). This program is a great opportunity to expand your technical, community, and leadership skills by contributing to a significant project like Ansible.The program will go through the following:

  • Handle the Ansible Community Package release
  • Manage the Community Execution Environment (Base and Minimal) release
  • Review release pull requests
  • Become an active member of the Release Management working group

Bullhorn 200

The Bullhorn, the Ansible Community newsletter, completed 200 editions (and is still counting) this year. We have shared news, project updates, and interesting tidbits from the Ansible community over the years. And we’re always looking forward to what is in store in the upcoming edition of Bullhorn in 2026.

Big Releases: Ansible-core 2.19 and 2.20

We saw two major ansible-core releases this year, and they were both pretty significant:

ansible-core 2.19.0 landed in August with some really important stability improvements and new features. Then ansible-core 2.20.0 came out in November, continuing to move the platform forward. And of course, we kept the maintenance releases flowing throughout the year (those 2.18.x and 2.17.x series) to make sure everyone running in production had a stable foundation.

The Templating Engine Got a Complete Makeover

The templating engine in ansible-core 2.19 got completely rewritten, and the community really engaged with it (we’re talking 3,820 views and 56 replies on the forum discussion). Here’s what changed:

  • The security model shifted from “trusted by default” to “untrusted by default” - way more secure.
  • Performance got a serious boost through lazy evaluation. Most of those nested/recursive templating operations, now they’re fully lazy, which means they only happen when actually needed.
  • Data types are preserved much better throughout the templating process.
  • Error messages got way more precise, which makes debugging so much easier.

How the community stepped in?

Collection maintainers really stepped up here. They tested their playbooks and roles, updated their code proactively, and got their CI configurations working with the new system. The feedback was generally positive, and it was pretty cool to see how collaborative the whole testing and improvement process was.

This change represents literally years of engineering work, and it’s going to benefit all of us for years to come with better performance, security, and reliability.

Ansible Community Package Kept Moving Forward

The Ansible community package went through some major version progressions this year:

  • The Ansible 11.x.x series: We extended its lifecycle until November to make sure everyone had time to transition. 11.x.x series EOLed with the final release of 11.13.0 in December. 11.x.x is the longest supported Ansible community package series with 13 stable releases.
  • Ansible 12.x.x graduated from pre-release to stable, starting with the 12.0.0 release and getting updates like 12.2.0. Ansible 12.x.x in EOL ed with 12.3.0 in the month December.
  • Ansible 13.x entered the pre-release phase with alpha and beta versions and is the current release.
  • We even started asking for community feedback on the Ansible 14 roadmap (planning ahead!)

It’s great to see how committed we all are to regular, predictable releases. Makes planning so much easier.

Community Execution Environment Images Keep Getting Better

Execution Environments really matured this year. We saw:

  • Regular releases of Community Execution Environment Base and Minimal images
  • Versions that aligned nicely with ansible-core releases (2.19.4-1, 2.20.0-1 and 2.20.1-1)
  • Updates to infrastructure utilities collections (infra.ee_utilities)
  • Galaxy and EDA operators changed up their release approach

EE adoption keeps growing, and it’s becoming the recommended way to run Ansible automation. Good stuff!

We Moved to Read the Docs

There were two main reasons behind this migration:

  • Improving the docs experience for the Ansible community (see more on this below).
  • Opening up the full release process to Ansible community maintainers.

By migrating the subdomain to Read The Docs, we now have a unified space for all Ansible community documentation under the docs.ansible.com subdomain. Ansible community documentation can now get the full benefit of Read the Docs hosting, including features like cross-project search, version switcher, and pull request previews.

You can read all about the migration effort in the forum thread, We’re moving to Read the Docs.

New Ansible Meetup Strategy

We are delighted to announce the official adoption of the New Ansible Community Meetup Strategy as part of the move to Ansible on Meetup Pro!

This strategy is a core component of our wider Ansible Community goals. Its establishment will help us set clear guidelines, expectations, and rules to effectively support and grow this crucial initiative worldwide.

Following a successful review, the proposed new meetup strategy PR has been merged into the Meetup Toolkit.

Want to know more, read the full Meetup Strategy document

We truly believe this updated framework will provide organizers with the clear guidance they need to make their Ansible meetups a success.

Community Events in 2025!

We had some fantastic community events this year:

Plus all the regular virtual and local meetups - Ansible-Minneapolis, AWS community meetings, AAP Config as Code office hours. It’s been great seeing everyone!

We Consolidated Our Community Platforms

Here’s something strategic we tackled: consolidating where we all communicate.

  • The Ansible Network Slack instance was proposed for closure - we’re bringing those discussions over to the Ansible Forum.
  • The Forum is becoming our primary community hub (which makes sense).
  • Matrix chat (#social:ansible.com) is where we go for real-time discussions.
  • We dealt with some forum spam challenges (thanks to everyone who helped!).

The goal? A more unified, searchable, and accessible community experience. One place where you can find what you need.

Highlights from 2025

Beyond all the official announcements, the Forum had some really vibrant discussions. Here are the topics that got everyone engaged:

Antsibull Tooling Got Some Love

The Antsibull project (which powers our release and documentation tooling) saw some nice improvements:

  • antsibull-docs 2.23.0 - brought in new Sphinx extension roles for referencing module options and return values
  • antsibull-nox 0.7.0 - updated CI matrix generation for ansible-core branches
  • Collection documentation generation got better
  • Better integration with that Read The Docs migration we talked about

These improvements mean better docs and more efficient release processes for everyone in the ecosystem.

Ansible AI Policy

One of the most impactful discussions we’ve had this year was the discussion on AI policy and how we should handle AI-generated contributions (528 views, 23 replies) in the community.

The big questions:

  • Should we have an explicit AI contribution policy?
  • What do we do about AI-generated code submissions and bug reports?
  • What about copyright and ethical implications?

Where people landed:

The community was pretty divided. Some folks wanted strict policies (like Servo’s approach that just prohibits AI-generated contributions entirely). Others wanted a more flexible approach where individual projects could decide. There was talk about using “Assisted-by:” attribution or updating the Code of Conduct.

Where we’re at:

No definitive policy was established, but I think the discussion showed how proactive this community is about thinking through emerging technologies and what they mean for open-source collaboration.

Collection Lifecycle Management Got More Intentional

We really focused on keeping the collection ecosystem healthy this year. That meant making some tough decisions about collections that weren’t being maintained:

Collections on the way out:

But we also had major collection releases:

  • community.general 12.0.0 (which dropped support for ansible-core 2.16)
  • community.docker 5.0.0
  • community.crypto 3.0.0 (got a major modernization)
  • redhat.openshift 5.0.0
  • microsoft.ad (ansible.windows) 3.0.0

The whole point is making sure you all have reliable, well-maintained collections to work with.

Thank you for 2025 and let’s grow strong in 2026!

So yeah, 2025 was quite a year! We saw significant technical advancement, community consolidation, and real ecosystem maturation. The templating engine rewrite, the documentation platform migration, the continued cadence of ansible-core and community package releases - it all shows a healthy, evolving project.

The focus on collection lifecycle management and community platform consolidation shows we’re thinking about long-term sustainability, not just quick wins.

As we look toward 2026, the Ansible community continues to grow with active vendor participation, regular community events, and ongoing technical innovation. We are excited to see where we go next! We hope to have a more successful, open and collaborative 2026. And of course how can we end without saying this “on behalf of Ansible Community, happy automating!”.

Thank you,

Ansible Community Team

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The Bullhorn #213
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Newly born community.openwrt says “Hi, don’t forget about me!!! :-)”. Thanks to everyone who helped directly or indirectly to make that happen!

The collection is still at version 0.2.0, but with a lot of promise for this next year. Watch that space!

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