Ansible Container is a tool that uses Ansible playbooks to build and deploy Docker containers. It was created because Ansible is commonly used to manage containers, shell scripts are limited, and Ansible can bridge containers to orchestration tools. With Ansible Container, a playbook replaces the Dockerfile for building images from roles and tasks. It aims to end the need for complex shell scripts by providing a simple way to build, run, push and deploy containers using Ansible. Key commands are init to set up project files, build to build the image, run to start containers, and push to upload images to a registry.