With AWS ssh, you need to use a private key. When working on a new script, I didn’t want to deal with my private account having a “build box” which was already on the VPC. So I was using my box & giving the destination a public IP. I know… totally insecure but considering I was killing the VM every few minutes I didn’t care.

So to call ansible-playbook & provide a private key:

ansible-playbook -i envs/localhost elasticsearch.yml -vvvv --private-key=~/.ssh/mykeyname.pem