ansible-core is the minimal engine of Ansible: the language, runtime, command-line tools and the ansible.builtin Collection. The “ansible” community package installs ansible-core plus a curated set of Collections. The two are versioned separately, so each community package release depends on a specific ansible-core version.
ansible --version shows the installed ansible-core version, the config file in use and the Python version. ansible-galaxy collection list shows installed Collection versions.
Each ansible-core release can drop support for Python versions, remove deprecated features and change module behavior. Upgrades are where Playbooks break most often. Steampunk Spotter checks Playbooks against a target ansible-core version before you upgrade, and an internal benchmark showed 8× faster migration to Red Hat AAP.
