What are execution environments?
Under the previous major version of Ansible Automation Platform, jobs and playbooks were run with bubblewrap to isolate the process. They also took advantage of Python virtual environments. However, managing these virtual environments and module dependencies was challenging and labor-intensive. EEs are the answer to this.
EEs are prebuilt containers that are made to run Ansible playbooks. These replace using Python virtual environments as the standard way of using different versions of Python and Python packages. Ansible’s Automation controller takes advantage of these environments to scale and run job templates as well. They solve the issue of, it works for me, maintaining different environments across all nodes, and other problems that arose from the previous solution. They also double as a simplified developmental version of the Automation controller for testing a job template when using the same container as the controller.
