Background

Support for VM and disk image fact details would allow for playbook idempotence as automators build out support for their automations based on what VMs are deployed within a cloud region as opposed to being configured within a playbook. Per the supplied customer example, the CLI is used to request image data and retrieve the necessary image in order to create a VM or perform a later operation. Support for AMI facts would allow this operation to be native to Ansible and a better automation experience for our customers.

The equivalent of az vm list and az vm disk operations to collect facts for a given az region would simplify automations that require this capability.

Business Impact: Protection of unnecessary company costs using this enhancement, potential of automation scalability through cloud region detection VM shape fact collection.

Story

As an Ansible on Clouds user I can get information / facts from Azure APIs about the state of my Azure Virtual Machines and disk images so that I can construct decision-driven automations with Ansible based on the current state of these Azure resources.