How we reduced the time required to prepare the test environment by using Ansible

Many people have faced a situation when a certain process needs to be automated due to its suboptimal timing. I will tell you about our experience in automating the process of test environment preparation by implementing Ansible in the testing department. The presentation will address the following questions: 

• what problems made us think about finding options to optimize the process in question; 
• why we chose this particular tool and what alternatives we considered; 
• what Ansible is: what it is, what it consists of, how it works; 
• what route we took to achieve our goal; 
• what requirements we defined for each step; 
• how and by what criteria we chose related tools; 
• what challenges we encountered along the way and how we solved them, and a bit about bad practices and what they lead to in the long run; 
• how Ansible is finally used in our processes and what benefits it brings; 
• what results have already been achieved and what plans we have for the future.