Any time Ansible makes a connection to a host to perform a task, a connection plugin is used. Ansible ships with a few connection plugins, including ssh, docker, chroot, local, and smart. Additional connection mechanisms can be utilized by Ansible to connect to remote systems by creating a connection plugin, which may be useful if faced with connecting to some new type of system, such as a network switch, or perhaps your refrigerator some day. Creating connection plugins is a bit beyond the scope of this book; however, the easiest way to get started is to read through the existing plugins that ship with Ansible and pick one to modify as necessary. The existing plugins can be found in plugins/connection/ wherever the Ansible Python libraries are installed on your system, such as /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ansible/plugins/connection on my system.