Summary
DevOps has pushed automation in many new directions, including the creation of infrastructure itself. Cloud computing services enable self-service management of fleets of servers to run services. Ansible can easily interact with these services to provide the automation and orchestration engine.
Ansible can start nothing but the host it is running on, and with proper credentials it can create the infrastructure it wants to manage, for one-off actions or to deploy a new version of an application into a production container management system.