diff --git a/playbooks/roles/install-docker/tasks/main.yaml b/playbooks/roles/install-docker/tasks/main.yaml
index bd9b0a65a0..1951ab312e 100644
--- a/playbooks/roles/install-docker/tasks/main.yaml
+++ b/playbooks/roles/install-docker/tasks/main.yaml
@@ -18,11 +18,14 @@
 # We install docker-compose from pypi to get features like
 # stop_grace_period.
 
-# On arm64 we need build-essential, python3-dev, libffi-dev, and libssl-dev
-# because wheels don't exist for all the things on arm64
-
+# On arm64 we need build-essential, python3-dev, libffi-dev, and
+# libssl-dev because wheels don't exist for all the things on arm64.
+# Similarly for Xenial while we have it, some things (cffi) have
+# stopped providing Python 3.5 wheels
 - name: Install arm64 dev pacakges
-  when: ansible_architecture == 'aarch64'
+  when: >
+      ansible_architecture == 'aarch64' or
+      ansible_distribution_release == 'xenial'
   package:
     name:
       - build-essential