Local connections and facts

Ansible modules are Python code that's executed on the remote host by default. Because of the fact that most network equipment does not expose Python directly, or they simply do not contain Python, we are almost always executing the playbook locally. This means that the playbook is interpreted locally first and commands or configurations are pushed out later on as needed.

Recall that the remote host facts were gathered via the setup module, which was added by default. Since we are executing the playbook locally, the setup module will gather the facts on the localhost instead of the remote host. This is certainly not needed, therefore when the connection is set to local, we can reduce this unnecessary step by setting ...

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