Docker and Ansible: Setting Up a Reproducible On-Prem Stack in a Weekend

Docker and Ansible: Setting Up a Reproducible On-Prem Stack in a Weekend You have decided to move off the cloud. The spreadsheets convinced your CTO, the timeline is approved, and now someone — probably you — has to actually build the infrastructure. The question is not whether Docker and Ansible are the right tools. They are, for 90% of Nordic SMBs running steady-state workloads. The question is how to set them up so that your on-prem stack is reproducible, maintainable, and not a snowflake that only one person understands. I recently stood up exactly this kind of Docker Ansible on-premise setup for a client migrating off Azure — a .NET backend API, Angular frontends, PostgreSQL, and a full monitoring stack. Four VMs, zero cloud dependencies, and the whole thing was reproducible from a single ansible-playbook command within a weekend. Here is how. Reference Architecture: The 4-VM Layout Before writing a single line of YAML, you need a target architecture. Here is the layout I use for