With the exception of Windows hosts (as discussed at the end of the previous section), Ansible uses the SSH protocol to communicate with hosts. The reasons for this choice in the Ansible design are many, not least that just about every Linux/FreeBSD/macOS host has it built in, as do many network devices such as switches and routers. This SSH service is normally integrated with the operating system authentication stack, enabling you to take advantage of things such as Kerberos to improve authentication security. Also, features of OpenSSH such as ControlPersist are used to increase the performance of the automation tasks and SSH jump hosts for network isolation and security.
ControlPersist is enabled ...
