What are Ansible Collections?

Ansible Collections represent a major departure from the traditional monolithic approach to Ansible releases, where over 3,600 modules were being released along with the Ansible executables at one point. This, as you can imagine, was making Ansible releases unmanageable, and also meant that end users had to wait for an entirely new release of Ansible to receive a feature update or bug fix to a single module—obviously a very inefficient approach.

Thus, Ansible Collections were born, and their premise is quite simple: they are a mechanism for building, distributing, and consuming multiple different types of Ansible content. When you first migrate from Ansible 2.9 or earlier, your experience with Ansible Collections will come in the form of modules. As we discussed earlier in this chapter, what we call Ansible 4.3 is actually a package comprising around 85 collections…it does not contain the Ansible executables at all! Each of these collections...