Changes in Ansible 4.3

While we touched on this topic in Chapter 1, The System Architecture and Design of Ansible, it is important that we look in greater depth at these changes to help you fully understand how Ansible 4.3 differs from prior releases. This will help you greatly in writing good playbooks and maintaining and upgrading your Ansible infrastructure – it is an essential step to mastery of Ansible 4.3!

First off, a little history. As we discussed in the preceding chapter, Ansible possesses a number of strengths in its design that have led to its rapid growth and uptake. Many of these strengths, such as its agentless design and easy-to-read YAML code, remain the same. Indeed, if you read the change logs for Ansible releases since 2.9, you will observe that there have been few changes of note to the core Ansible functionality since that release—rather, all the development effort has gone into another area.

Ansible's modules were undoubtedly one of its...