It does have some appeal to use playbooks I have lying around anyway to build containers.
But I also notice that in an immutable world, where containers are built once and new builds are started from scratch, the main appeal of Ansible (and other configuration management tools) is in their idempotence, which has literally no value when you build everything from scratch every time.
If you provision a cluster of servers and expect that they will be updated regularly (like updating the installed version of openssl) it makes sense to use something like Ansible to make the results predictable.
But when you are building containers, a simple shell script will also have the same result every time.
I wish there was more of an investment in Ansible Galaxy. Being able to get software installed & running in a default state without a lot of effort is super helpful, particularly for systems that have complicated installation procedures.
I sort of wish they could make some sort of installer system around Ansible and convince developers to use it.
But I also notice that in an immutable world, where containers are built once and new builds are started from scratch, the main appeal of Ansible (and other configuration management tools) is in their idempotence, which has literally no value when you build everything from scratch every time.
If you provision a cluster of servers and expect that they will be updated regularly (like updating the installed version of openssl) it makes sense to use something like Ansible to make the results predictable.
But when you are building containers, a simple shell script will also have the same result every time.