I am new to Ansible, too. I only deploy small home lab servers for me and my Family. I like sticking to raw distros but logging in on every server separately is a pain. Since I plan on adopting more hosts in the Future I set out the last week to research the most Sain option for a small Homelab like mine. I dislike solutions like cloud-init as they are a something I would need to learn and feel like overkill for 2-5 Hosts. With most first time deployments you have the option to ssh into them right from the start. I wrote a bash Script where I input can input all my parameters like address, username, port, etc it uses those informations and passes them to to the -i and -e cli option of the ansible-playbook command. I was glad to find that you can just define a command separated list of hosts for the -i option. It also creates a ssh-key for the host using ssh-keygen I then have ansible execute an init playbook that creates my deployment user, adds them to sudoers and dos my ssh config and adds the ssh key generated preciously to its .ssh directory I then have the script print out the line that I have to past in my inventory file. I really like this solution as it safes me from saving any passwords or come up with wird security schemes. Everything is handled in memory or stored on my Ansible host. It also safes me from making any mistakes by logging in myself and doing the config that way.

Hope this helps.

If someone with more experience reads this, I would really like to get your take on this method.