I've been developing a few server deployment playbooks with Ansible lately, but the playbooks use the root user by default. I've always felt that root logins are "dangerous" and should be avoided so I have a "bootstrap" playbook to create a different privileged (but non-root) user and disable root login. All subsequent playbooks can then use the non-privileged user.

I was wondering what best practices are in this regard, with root login and automated deployment/configuration management tools. It'll be interesting to hear your thoughts! Thanks.