DevOps has pushed automation in many new directions, including the containerization of applications, and even the creation of an infrastructure itself. Cloud computing services enable self-service management of fleets of servers for running services. Ansible can easily interact with these services to provide the automation and orchestration engine.

In this chapter, you learned how to manage on-premise cloud infrastructures, such as OpenStack, using Ansible. We then extended this with examples of public cloud infrastructure provision on both AWS and Microsoft Azure. Finally, you learned how to interact with Docker using Ansible, and how to neatly package Docker service definitions using Ansible Container.

Ansible can start just about any host, except for the one that it is running on, and with proper credentials, it can create the infrastructure that it wants to manage, either for one-off actions or to deploy a new version of an application into a production container management system. The end result is that once your hardware is in place and your service providers are configured, you can manage your entire infrastructure through Ansible, if you so desire!

In the final chapter of this book, we will look at a new and rapidly growing area of automation: network provisioning with Ansible.