How can you optimize role design to avoid duplicate work at scale?

• Use run_once for cluster-wide actions - a task that only needs to happen once across the whole play (like registering a load balancer entry) shouldn't repeat per host.
• Cache expensive lookups - if a role queries an external API or database for shared data, fetch it once (e.g. via delegate_to on a single host, or run_once) and share the result via a fact or registered variable, rather than every host repeating the same external call.
• Structure role dependencies carefully in meta/main.yml - without care, the same dependency role can run multiple times if several roles in a play each declare it as a dependency; set allow_duplicates: false where repetition isn't needed.
• Use group_vars/host_vars instead of per-role redundant variable definitions so shared configuration isn't copy-pasted into every role that needs it.
• Leverage fact caching so roles across many plays in the same run (or repeated runs) aren't each triggering their own full fact gathering pass.

The common thread is identifying work that's logically "once per play/run" rather than "once per host" and making that explicit with the right directive, instead of letting Ansible's default per-host execution model repeat genuinely shared work unnecessarily across every target.

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