Continuing the Crunchy Postgres via Automation (CPA) blog series, we’re back today with another ‘Coming Soon’ entry, where we discuss items that have been merged into development and will appear in a future release. This time around, we’re adding a new supported OS platform, dropping an existing OS platform, and raising the minimal version of ansible-core.

First up, we’re happy to announce that support for Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat) has been added. Noble is an LTS release, and like both Focal and Jammy before it, we will maintain support for it in CPA for the life of the release. We recommend that Noble users use the Ansible PPA to install ansible-core 2.17.7 if it will be used as your Ansible controller. Many thanks to our Build team for getting us package parity with our other supported OSes and allowing us to fully support Noble.

Next up, we’re officially dropping support in CPA for Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa); this LTS release will become end up life upstream in April, so it’s time to retire it as a supported CPA platform. Existing releases of CPA will continue to function as normal against Focal, but upcoming CPA releases will refuse to work with it. We advise you to plan on upgrading to a supported LTS release as quickly as you can.

The eagle-eyed among you might wonder why it took us almost a year to add support for Noble. The answer is that Focal was still supported and we didn’t wish to bloat our supported OS matrix. We currently support Ubuntu Focal and Jammy as well as RedHat 8 and 9 and have our hands full managing the packaging and dependencies with just those four releases. Therefore, we decided that we would add Noble when we drop Focal. Likewise, we’ll add RedHat 10 when we drop RedHat 8. Or at least, that’s how we’ll handle things at our current staffing levels.

Finally, by dropping support for Ubuntu Focal, we can raise the floor on our supported Ansible versions. Currently we support ansible-core 2.13.3 - 2.18.x, but the upcoming release will raise that to ansible-core 2.14.17 - 2.18.x. (oddly, RedHat 9 has 2.14.17 in the default system repos while RedHat 8 has 2.16.3). For the protection of our clients, we also recently made the Ansible version check an actual failure and not just a warning. So this new floor and ceiling will be enforced in the code.

OK, that covers the newest upcoming hotness for CPA (for now). Until next time, keep hacking!

:wq