Originally published on kuryzhev.cloud
Your Ansible bootstrap playbook fails on the first run against a freshly created instance, then works perfectly when you re-run it thirty seconds later. If that sounds familiar, you're dealing with an ansible bootstrap playbook failing intermittently — and it's almost never the network. I've hit this exact pattern on AWS EC2, Hetzner, and DigitalOcean droplets, and the fix is the same every time: stop treating "instance running" as "instance ready."
Symptoms
Three failure signatures show up, usually in combination, and they're maddening because they're non-deterministic. First: UNREACHABLE! => Failed to connect to the host via ssh on a brand-new instance, gone entirely on the second attempt. The exact error is:
fatal: [10.0.1.42]: UNREACHABLE! => {
