Using Ansible to Create Docker Images

Docker provides an out-of-box solution to build Docker images using a Docker domain-specific language. Docker files are created in order to provide spin-up instructions that Docker can execute in order to build an image. After learning to create Docker files, one may ask why we would advocate for leveraging Ansible to create Docker containers in conjunction with a Dockerfile. The answer is quite simple-idempotency. An idempotent operation is one where the operation, once executed, can be executed repeatedly without any change. This is precisely what Ansible does.

Once Ansible has effected a change in a given system, it will automatically skip that change if the change is already present. So for example, if an Ansible playbook runs against a target system and makes, say, four changes to that system, it will automatically skip trying to make that change again if the change is found already present or if the system is already in the desired state.

In terms...