Ansible 1.9.0 was released recently, and the latest iteration brings a slew of new fixes and features. Support for kerberos to the winrm connection plugin has been added, a much-needed tool for managing Windows servers. PBRun authentication support has been implemented as well, along with sudo and su authentication. 

There’s also enhanced ssh connection error reporting, which now provides a specific message from ssh. New tags have been added, including “all,” “tagged,” “untagged,” and “always.”

According to GitHub, significant changes include:

• Added kerberos support to winrm connection plugin.
• Tags rehaul: added 'all', 'always', 'untagged' and 'tagged' special tags and normalized tag resolution. Added tag information to --list-tasks and new --list-tags option.
• Privilege Escalation generalization, new 'Become' system and variables now will handle existing and new methods. Sudo and su have been kept for backwards compatibility. New methods pbrun and pfexec in 'alpha' state, planned adding 'runas' for winrm connection plugin.
• Improved ssh connection error reporting, now you get back the specific message from ssh.
• Added facility to document task module return values for registered vars, both for ansible-doc and the docsite. Documented copy, stats and acl modules, the rest must be updated individually (we will start doing so incrementally).
• Optimize the plugin loader to cache available plugins much more efficiently. For some use cases this can lead to dramatic improvements in startup time.
• Overhaul of the checksum system, now supports more systems and more cases more reliably and uniformly.
• Fix skipped tasks to not display their parameters if no_log is specified.

See the full changelog here. Psyched for the latest Ansible release? Still waiting for certain features? Share your thoughts in the comment section below, or hit us up on Twitter.