With many organizations making heavy use of automation for their build processes, implementing containers today means creating complicated and brittle shell scripts to build the containers themselves. Managing the life cycle of containers from dev to prod has become a tedious and manual process. Ansible Container is the ultimate workflow for container development, testing, and deployment. The goal of this book is to get you up and running with Ansible Container so that you can create container images from Ansible roles, run containers locally, and deploy them to the cloud.

We’ll progress from a simple, single container application, to a complex application consisting of multiple, connected containers. You’ll learn how to run the application locally, how to deploy it to an OpenShift cluster running locally, and how to deploy it to an OpenShift cluster running in the cloud. Along the way, you’ll see how to use roles to define each image or micro-service, and how to share your completed project with the Ansible community. Next, you will be able to take full advantage of Ansible Container, and use it to automate the container lifecycle in your own projects. By the end of this book, you will gain some hands-on experience troubleshooting an application in Google Container Engine (GKE).