This week in Ansible Community
Issue #216, 2026-01-26 (Past Issues)
Welcome to The Bullhorn, our newsletter for the Ansible Community. This week we are presenting the CfgMgmtCamp & Contributor Summit Edition of Bullhorn.
If you have any questions or content you’d like to share, you’re welcome to chat with us in the Ansible Social room on Matrix, and mention newsbot to have your news item tagged for review for the next weekly issue!
Editor’s note
The Bullhorn: CfgMgmtCamp & Contributor Summit Edition
Hello, Ansible Community!
The road to Ghent is officially open! February is shaping up to be a massive month for automation enthusiasts as we gear up for Config Management Camp 2026, with dedicated Ansible Tracks and our dedicated Ansible Contributor Summit on February 4th.
Whether you’re a long-time steward of the ecosystem, a fresh collaborator, or an Ansible advocate, this is your primary opportunity to sync with the Red Hat engineering teams and the community members who keep the gears turning. From deep-dives into the 2026 roadmap to open-floor demos and strategy sessions on Bullhorn improvements, we’re covering it all.
Inside this edition:
The Full Agenda: A breakdown of the Ansible tracks at CfgmgmtCamp and Contributor Summit morning sessions and the afternoon “unconference” tracks.
Call for Demos: How you can grab the mic and show off your latest project.
Community discussions: Help us decide which working groups should take center stage on Wednesday afternoon.
Community Bullhorn updates: And of course, our usual community contributions and updates to the Bullhorn.
Whether you are joining us in person in Belgium or tuning in virtually, we can’t wait to build the future of Ansible with you.
CfgmgmtCamp 2026
Calling All Ansible Enthusiasts to CfgMgmtCamp 2026! 
The automation landscape is shifting, but one thing remains constant: the strength of the Ansible community. As we look toward the challenges of 2026—from scaling hybrid clouds to integrating AI into our playbooks—there is no better place to sync up than at CfgMgmtCamp.
We are inviting all Ansible contributors, practitioners, and curious newcomers to join us for what promises to be our most impactful year yet.
What’s in Store for the Ansible Track?
CfgMgmtCamp has always been a “home base” for Ansible users. This year, we’re looking to dive deep into the practicalities of modern automation:
Next-Gen Collections: Sharing best practices for maintaining and scaling Ansible content.
Event-Driven Automation: Moving beyond scheduled tasks to truly responsive infrastructure.
The AI Integration: Discussing how LLMs and generative tools are changing the way we write and audit roles.
Community Governance: Meeting the faces behind the pull requests and shaping the future of the project.
Ansible Track & Related Sessions
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Building an Infrastructure Automation Platform using Platform Engineering principles by Niklas Werker
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Use Best-in-Class Tools for End-to-End Automation by Vincent Seynhaeve
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Growing a startup using ansible by Johan Van de Wauw
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OpenTofu Builds It, Ansible Configures It: Using the Right Tool for the Right Job by James Freeman
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Ansible for Beginners: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before I Learned the Hard Way by James Freeman
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Composing systems in an automated way with Ansible, Podman, and bootc by Fabio Alessandro “Fale” Locati
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Ansible - State of the Community by Gundalow
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Using antsibull-nox to test your Ansible collection by Felix Fontain
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Debugging Playbooks Made Easy: The Ansible Playbook Debugger by Jure Medvesek
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Building a self-contained, zero-dependency deployment with Ansible by Daniel Podwysocki
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Building CI/CD Pipelines for your Ansible code by Ottavia Balducci
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Behind The Scene- How We Ship Ansible Network Collections by Chetna Agrawal
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ansible-docsmith - ultimate tool to document ansible roles by Kirill Satarin
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How (not) to create Ansible collections from OpenAPI specifications? by Christian Stankowic & Pascal Kontschan
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Asking a local LLM about my Ansible playbooks because why not ! by David Moreau-Simard
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Reliable Network Backups & Restore with Ansible: Idempotent, Vendor-Neutral, with AI/ML Diff Severity by Rohit Thakur
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How we opened up Ansible’s documentation infrastructure to the community by Don Naro
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Ansible Style Guide and guidelines for compatibility with newer versions of Ansible community package/ansible-core (Ansible 12/ansible-core 2.19 and above) by Kostiantyn Volenbovskyi
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Writing, running, and testing awesome Ansible content with natural language and AI - powered by Ansible’s MCP server by Shatakshi Mishra
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A Love Letter to Ansible Core 2.19 by Matt Davis
Ansible Contributor Summit, 2026
Join Us for the Ansible Contributor Summit!
“Attention all developers, maintainers, and Ansible power users!”
The next Ansible Contributor Summit is happening on February 4, 2026. Whether you are a long-time contributor or just getting started, this is your chance to help shape the future of the ecosystem, voice your ideas, and connect with the folks behind the projects.We have a packed morning of updates and discussions, followed by an afternoon shaped entirely by you.
The Agenda (Tentative)
Time Session Topic Leads
(CET) 09:00 – 09:10 Introductions & Code of Conduct Community Team
(CET) 09:10 – 10:30 Community & Partner Engineering Updates @oranod & @gundalow
(CET) 10:30 – 11:30 State of the Nation: Open Discussion @felixfontein & @nitzmahone
(CET) 11:30 – 11:50 Coffee Break
(CET) 11:50 – 12:50 Community Strategy & Promotion (Bullhorn, Meetups, Releases) @anwesha & @gundalow
(CET) 13:00 – 14:00 Lunch Break
(CET) 14:00 – End Community-Led Sessions & Working Groups You!
Call for Speakers & DemosThe afternoon session is an open floor.
Do you have a project you’d like to demo? A specific concern you want to raise? A wild idea for a new collection?We want to hear from you. If you plan to join us—either in person in Ghent or virtually—please reply to this thread with:Your proposed topic.Your preferred time slot (if any).
Influence the Afternoon
We want to make sure the afternoon sessions are as productive as possible. Please respond to this thread to let us know which activities (working groups, hackathons, deep-dives) you’d like to see on Wednesday afternoon.See you there! Let’s make 2026 the best year for Ansible yet.
Other interesting talks
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The exploitation paradox in open source by Richard Fontana
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How automation games can make us better engineers by Greg Sutcliffe & David Moreau-Simard
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Own Your Data: Unlocking Documents with Docling by Carol Chen & Ming Zhao
Join the Conversation
Whether you’re managing ten servers or ten thousand, your experience is invaluable to this community. We don’t just want you in the audience; we want you in the mix. Let’s collaborate, let’s use this time to meet with core maintainers and fellow power users to solve real-world blockers in person.
Register Today
Secure your spot at Cfgmgmtcamp and join the dedicated Ansible fringe sessions, Ansible Contributor Summit, 2026.
Let’s show the broader configuration management world the power of “simple, yet powerful” automation.
Felix’s session at Ansible Contributor Summit
Felix Fontein said
When I announced in November (CfgMgmtCamp 2026 - #6 by felixfontein) that I wanted to give a “rant talk” at CfgMgmtCamp 2026 on things that currently really suck about how Ansible is going, I first made some notes to see whether I had enough to talk about. I’ve spent some time writing them down in more details, if you’re interested you can find them in a GH Gist (Topics for my planned rant talk at CfgMgmtCamp 2026 (https://forum.ansible.com/t/44250/6) · GitHub). Be warned that the document is quite long, and there definitely are more and other things that could also be mentioned. (I eventually had to stop writing / restrict myself to certain topics, so if topics you think that should be mentioned are missing it’s probably not because I don’t think they are not important :).
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.
Project updates 
AWX Project
AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. Join the AWX discussion in the Ansible Community Forum.
Moving forward with AWX modernization
Oranod contributed
Red Hat engineering has completed the work to refactor the AWX codebase. As the modernization effort continues, focus is on enabling developers and lowering the barriers to entry for contributing to the AWX project. Please join us in the forum to read the full post and take part in the discussion.
Collection updates 
Unmaintained Collection : netapp.cloudmanager
mariolenz shared
The
netapp.cloudmanagercollection is considered unmaintained and will be removed from the Ansible Community Package (ACP) 15 if no one starts maintaining it again before ACP 15. See the Ansible Community Package Collections Removal Process.
Please note that you can still manually install the collection withansible-galaxy collection install netapp.cloudmanagereven when it has been removed from the Ansible Community Package.
community.beszel
dbrennand said
community.beszel 0.6.2 has released with a minor change to the
hubandagentroles. The beszel system user is now created without a home directory.
infra.ee_utilities
Sean Sullivan said
infra.ee_utilities 4.2.2 has been released.
This Ansible collection makes it easy to build execution environments for AWX or Ansible Controller server and converting from python environments to execution environments.
Visit GitHub - redhat-cop/ee_utilities: This ansible collection includes a number of roles and tools which can be useful for managing Ansible Execution Environments. For more information and updates.
Certified collections updated this week:
Community events and meetups
Upcoming Community Events
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2026-02-02, CfgMgmtCamp 2026
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2026-02-05, AAP Config as Code Office Hours - First Thursday of Every Month
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2026-02-10, Announcing Our Official Code Freeze Schedule & Process
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2026-02-26, AWS Community Meeting
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Every Thursday @13:00 UTC, Network Working Group
Other events and releases
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!