This has been my experience as well. Even using a small subset of a playbook via tags can take a long time, especially if you&#x27;re doing a run in serial. One of our deployments that only affects six servers takes fifteen minutes.<p>This can be mitigated somewhat by putting Ansible on the target machine, downloading all the necessary files to that machine, and then running Ansible locally... but that seems awfully fragile to me.<p>I am much more interested in Salt&#x27;s ZeroMQ path these days. It seems to scale better, at least on paper and in my few small tests.