What are Ansible Content Collections, and why were modules moved into them?
Collections are packages that bundle modules, plugins and roles. Modules used to all live inside Ansible itself, which became unmanageable, so they were split into separate collections and ansible-core keeps only ansible.builtin.
Historically, thousands of modules for every cloud and vendor shipped inside the main Ansible release. That made releases huge and slow: a fix to one vendor's module had to wait for the next Ansible release.
The fix was to reorganise modules into separate Content Collections, each named by namespace, e.g. cisco.ios, amazon.aws, community.general:
- ansible-core keeps only a small set of modules, the
ansible.builtincollection. - Over 120 certified collections are available with a Red Hat subscription.
- Many community-supported collections are available on Ansible Galaxy (galaxy.ansible.com).
Collections are released independently, so vendors can update their content at their own pace.
Go deeper:
Using Ansible collections (official docs) — installing, verifying and using collections of modules, plugins and roles.- Collection Index (official docs) — browse the namespaced collections (amazon.aws, cisco.ios, community.general and more).
Ansible Galaxy — the community hub for finding and downloading collections and roles.