What’s new in cloud automation: Red Hat Ansible AWS 10.0.0

As cloud computing and automation with Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure continue to evolve, version 10.0.0 of Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for AWS continues to adapt and innovate. The release of version 10.0.0 brings a range of enhancements designed to streamline user workflows, improve reliability and support a more modern and security-focused automation environment. These updates help users accelerate the shift from development to production environments more smoothly.

In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at the key features, enhancements and important changes included in the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for amazon.aws 10.0.0.

Changes and enhancements

While this release focuses heavily on major features and breaking changes, several behind-the-scenes improvements have also been made to enhance the reliability, stability and clarity of error handling—particularly when working with Amazon S3 resources.

The S3-related modules and utilities in the collection have undergone important updates to improve how errors are detected, classified and surfaced to users. These changes make automation more robust and easier to troubleshoot, especially in edge cases or failure scenarios.

Key improvements:

• Support for HTTP 501 error code: The internal module_utils.s3 utility has been updated to recognize and handle the 501 Not Implemented HTTP error code. This enables automation to fail in a controlled and predictable way when encountering unsupported operations from S3, instead of generating vague or misleading error messages.
• Initial implementation of a centralized ErrorHandler: A foundational ErrorHandler has been introduced specifically for S3 bucket modules. This component standardizes the way errors are captured and reported, making the behavior more consistent across different S3 bucket related tasks.
• Updated s3_bucket module to use the new ErrorHandler: The s3_bucket module now takes advantage of the centralized ErrorHandler for improved handling of both AWS-specific and non-AWS-related issues. This refactor reduces ambiguity in error reporting and simplifies debugging in automation playbooks.

These changes enhance the reliability and clarity of error reporting when working with Amazon S3.

New connection plug-in

A major highlight of this release is the promotion of the aws_ssm connection plug-in to full Red Hat support. The aws_ssm plug-in allows users to connect to EC2 instances over AWS Systems Manager (SSM), eliminating the need for SSH access or public IP addresses. Instead, connections occur via the AWS SSM Agent, which is especially valuable for:

• Environments that disallow SSH for compliance or security reasons.
• Instances behind firewalls or in private VPC subnets.
• Reducing credential sprawl by eliminating key-pair management.

This plug-in offers a security-focused, agent-based and network-isolated connection method that aligns with modern infrastructure security best practices.

Note:  In an upcoming blog post, we’ll showcase practical use cases for aws_ssm and how to incorporate it into your automation workflows for increased security and scalability.

Updated support policies

Several updates reflect Red Hat's and AWS's commitment to supporting modern, security-focused platforms:

Ansible version support 

This release drops support for ansible-core versions below 2.17. Users should upgrade to take advantage of the latest features and ensure compatibility. For more information, visit the Ansible release documentation.

boto3/botocore SDK policy

The Collection now requires botocore >= 1.34.0 and boto3 >= 1.34.0.

Older SDK versions may still work, but compatibility is not guaranteed or tested. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform will display warnings if deprecated SDK versions are detected. Please refer to individual module documentation for version-specific requirements. Check out the module documentation for the minimum required version for each module. 

Python version policy

AWS announced that the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) v1 and AWS SDK for Python (boto3 and botocore) will no longer support Python 3.7. Following the AWS SDKs support policy update that removes support for Python versions below 3.8 and to continue to support Red Hat customers with security-focused and maintainable tools, we aligned with this situation and deprecated support for Python versions lower than 3.8 in the 6.0.0 release of the collection and removed Python versions below 3.8 in this 10.0.0 release.

Breaking changes

This release also introduces some breaking changes into the Collection's modules. These changes represent prior deprecations that have now been completely removed.

Changes for developers and contributors

If you're developing with or contributing to the amazon.aws collection, take note of several back-end and code quality changes.

Removed deprecated doc fragments

Several deprecated doc_fragments have now been fully removed. Contributors should update any custom modules or plug-ins using them: