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...