Announcing azcollection, the Ansible collection for Azure

Back in November, we shared with the community that we had moved 18 certified Azure modules to azcollection. Today, we are happy to announce that we have completed the migration of more than 150 Ansible Azure modules to the Ansible Azure Collection: azcollection.

Many of you are no stranger to Ansible’s plan to move anything not deemed ‘core’ into separate collection repositories in Ansible 2.10. Since the foundational Ansible components are separate from the content, from Ansible 2.10 onwards, you will need to perform a small additional step to install the latest release of azcollection.

To install azcollection, run the following command:

ansible-galaxy collection install azure.azcollection

Note: Ansible 2.9 (or later) is required for azcollection.

To make sure you have the most recent version, add the “–force” flag.

ansible-galaxy collection install azure.azcollection –force

If you use Azure Cloud Shell, we are working on getting azcollection installed by default. In the meantime, you should run the same ansible-galaxy command in Cloud Shell.

Using azcollection

To reference the collection content, add these two lines (bolded) to your playbook:

- hosts: all
  collections:
   - azure.azcollection
  tasks:
    - ...

Contribute to azcollection

If you are interested in fixing issues and contributing to the code base, please refer to this README that details how to contribute directly to azcollection.

Bonus module: azure_rm_keyvaultsecret_info

We do have a small surprise for all of our users! We added the new module azure_rm_keyvaultsecret_info to azcollection. You can now retrieve the secret you store in the Azure Key Vault and use it in subsequent tasks. To learn more, check out this new end-to-end tutorial on how to use Azure Key Vault modules with a Linux virtual machine.

Migrating all of the Azure content was no small feat. To name just the basics, we needed to test all of the modules against ansible-base and set up a robust test infrastructure. While there are still minor kinks to iron, like working with our Red Hat counterparts on the documentation for new modules in our collection, we’re incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved. Now that we’ve completed this major undertaking, we’re hoping to switch our focus back to adding more coverage for Azure services. If you have any feedback, please let us know on GitHub.

Please be on the lookout for additional features and tutorials to be added.

Resources

Ansible Documentation Hub

Ansible Azure Collection

Using Collections

Questions, comments, or feedback? Please let us know in the comments.