Cloud-1: How I Automated a Full Cloud Deployment with Ansible and Docker

Zero manual SSH sessions. Zero hand-typed commands. One ansible-playbook call and the whole stack is live. A Little Context The 42 School curriculum loves throwing you into the deep end. Cloud-1 is one of those moments: you get a blank cloud VM, a web application to deploy, and a mandate to automate everything . No clicking around in a dashboard, no running commands by hand on the server — the entire deployment pipeline has to be repeatably scripted. The result is a clean DevOps project that touches Ansible, Docker Compose, Nginx, Certbot (Let's Encrypt), DuckDNS, and automated certificate renewal. In this post I'll walk through the design and the most interesting implementation details. The Architecture at a Glance Local Machine (control node) │ │ ansible-playbook │ ──────────────────────► Cloud VM (Ubuntu) │ │ │ ├─ Docker │ │ ├─ WordPress │ │ ├─ Nginx (reverse-proxy + SSL termination) │ │ ├─ MariaDB │ │ └─ Certbot (one-shot certificate issuer) │ │ │ └─ anacron (monthly cert renewal)