Currently OpenDev Zuul's default Ansible version is Ansible 6. Zuul has recently added support for Ansible 8, and is dogfooding Ansible 8 in the Zuul tenant for the Zuul project. Yesterday, the OpenDev team updated the Zuul tenant for the OpenDev project to default to Ansible 8 as well. So far we have seen no problems with jobs run in these two tenants related to the Ansible version change.

We would like to update the default Ansible version for all of the Zuul tenants in OpenDev's Zuul installation to Ansible 8 in the near future. The reason for this is Zuul will update the default Ansible version to Ansible 8 in Zuul itself. Not long after that change, support for Ansible 6 in Zuul will be removed. Changing things in OpenDev first allows us to do these changes in a controlled manner and get ahead of any potential problems.

Assuming the Zuul and OpenDev tenants continue to run without trouble our plan is to switch the nebulous, pyca, pypa, and vexxhost tenants to Ansible 8 by default on August 28, 2023. Then if things continue to run without trouble, we will complete this change by updating the openstack tenant on September 4, 2023. I had initially thought that we would do a more conservative rollout, but initial data indicates this change may be straightforward so we'd prefer a quicker move. Note that if there are major issues we can revert the setting in our Ansible config for any of these tenants and return to a default to Ansible 6 while the issues get addressed. Issues will need to be addressed as Ansible 6 is EOL and Zuul intends to drop support for this version of Ansible.

If you would like to test your jobs before the tenant configuration updates go into effect you can do so by setting `ansible-version: '8'` in the configuration of a job [0], push the resulting change to Gerrit, and then wait for Zuul to run the job and provide you with results. It is not necessary to merge the change; Zuul will speculatively test this setting. If you discover any problems through this process please let us know.

[0] https://zuul-ci.org/docs/zuul/latest/config/job.html#attr-job.ansible-versio...

Clark