Building containers with Ansible

As we mentioned at the beginning of the previous section, the world of containers has moved on greatly since the previous edition of this book was published. Although Docker is still a massively popular container technology, new and improved technologies have become favored, and indeed natively integrated into Linux operating systems. Canonical (the publisher of Ubuntu) is championing the LXC container environment, while Red Hat (the owner of Ansible) is championing Buildah and Podman.

If you read the third edition of this book, you will know that we covered a technology called Ansible Container, which was used to directly integrate Ansible with Docker and remove the need for glue steps such as adding hosts to the in-memory inventory, having two separate plays for instantiating the container, and building the container image contents. Ansible Container has now been deprecated, and all development work has ceased (according to their GitHub page...