DevOps Articles

Ansible Automation Platform Moving Towards Smarter Inventory

It has been a long term ask and our desire to make Smart Inventory, well, smarter. We’ve listened to feedback, and are now addressing not only direct customer asks but also presenting solutions to make it better overall. The current Smart Inventory has a number of shortcomings: The smart inventory host_filter cannot express that a variable EQUALS a value, or do basic logic like NOT.

All of these issues stem from the original design of Smart Inventory, and the fact that Inventory Django models (Inventory, Group, and Host) save their “variables” in text form as YAML/JSON, as they appear in the UI.

This will initially coexist alongside the current Smart Inventory facility, but we hope to ultimately to supersede it.