Dockerfiles, while being the de factor standard for generating Docker containers, are also often seen as cumbersome to write and maintain due to the nature of Docker layering, subtle behaviour changes due to caches, and best practices who requires explicit actions to be applied. To improve this situation while keeping the innovation of Docker, the Ansible community came with the ansible-container project, a tool that permit to reuse the existing trove of Ansible roles to create, build and deploy containers in production with a single command.

This talk will present the project, explain the basics of ansible-container, show how to use it to build and deploy a complex multi-containers application.