At first glance, Ansible and Docker seem to be redundant. Both offer solutions to the configuration management problem through very different means, enabling you to reliably and repeatably manage complicated software deployments. While you certainly can use either on its own with great success, using both together can result in a fast, clean deployment process.

There are two ways that you can combine them, both useful for different reasons. You can use Ansible to orchestrate the deployment and configuration of your Docker containers on the host, or you can use Ansible to construct your Docker container images based on Ansible playbooks as a more powerful alternative to Dockerfiles.