In the past, we ran Ansible on our bastion aka jump host. I’ve seen many postings online that people actually install Ansible locally and manage it completely from there. What are the pros and cons of going with that setup over having Ansible installed on an instance?
We, at hioscar.com, run ansible local from the local goat for all config runs from cron, every 10 minutes.
Pros:
It’s fast
It’s automatic, so devs don’t need direct access to our systems.
Con:
It isn’t aware of the whole inventory, mainly due to our setup. This ends up complicating things when you build logic around inventory knowledge of other systems. An example is setting quorum size based on number of nodes in the inventory.
Overall it’s been a cool setup. If the con is a show stopper, then check out ansible tower.
And by “goat”, I mean host. 
Interesting, you are deploying ansible in on each of your production servers and running it in local mode. I’ve done that for experimentation, but did not consider doing it at scale.
To avoid confusion - by local I was asking if people are running playbooks from their personal machine rather than the actual host where software is deployed.
for non config type stuff, we run from local notebooks, or an admin host (triggered by our chatbot), depending on what is happening, and who is triggering it.