Com base nessas balas dos documentos oficiais, eu diria que você deve ser capaz de fazer o que quiser usando apenas ssh sem problemas.
- Dead simple setup
- Super fast & parallel by default
- No server or client daemons; use existing SSHd
- No additional software required on client boxes
- Modules can be written in ANY language
- Awesome API for creating very powerful distributed scripts
- Be usable as non-root
- The easiest config management system to use, ever.
Isso também é repetido no manual do usuário e na documentação.
By default, Ansible 1.3 and later will try to use native OpenSSH for
remote communication when possible. This enables both ControlPersist
(a performance feature), Kerberos, and options in ~/.ssh/config such
as Jump Host setup. When using Enterprise Linux 6 operating systems as
the control machine (Red Hat Enterprise Linux and derivatives such as
CentOS), however, the version of OpenSSH may be too old to support
Control Persist. On these operating systems, Ansible will fallback
into using a high-quality python implementation of OpenSSH called
‘paramiko’. If you wish to use features like Kerberized SSH and more,
consider using Fedora, OS X, or Ubuntu as your control machine until a
newer version of OpenSSH is available for your platform – or engage
‘accelerated mode’ in Ansible.