I attempted to do something like this when figuring out our build problems but it didn't really work for me. It doesn't solve the problem of actually getting configuration into the build very well because it still relies on Dockerfiles and has the added side effect of making the cache mostly useless. Maybe I was just doing it wrong?

I also attempted to try Ansible for deploying containers and had issues with both of these bugs:

https://github.com/ansible/ansible-modules-core/issues/27 https://github.com/ansible/ansible-modules-core/issues/188

Do people actually use Ansible to control Docker in practice? It would be great to have something that was a step up from building random Python scripts from scratch :)

(Disclaimer: I'm not very good at Ansible.)