Background

Large deployments take a long time to operate against with no inventory caching. Lack of caching support leads to the perception that Ansible is slow and not performant. Caching support would allow customers to define a TTL for inventory discovery and allow for subsequent automations to speed up dramatically.

User Stories

As an Ansible on Azure user I can define an inventory caching TTL that allows for my automations to assess the current state of my infrastructure, create an inventory based on that assessment, and cache the assessment for a configurable period of time so that I may reduce the time that subsequent automations take to run by a significant margin.

Supporting documentation

<include links to technical docs, diagrams, etc>

Ready-Ready

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dBW492UfCR5JxUvcx6efjYP_ibCdiwGONS-sxDb_SPU/edit# 

Complete Ready-Ready checklist

Definition of Done

Should be agreed upon per team; add/remove/update to reflect:{}

• CI is running, tests are automated and merged and successful
• DEV upstream code & tests merged
• DEV upstream documentation merged
• DEV downstream build attached to advisory
• QE - Test plans documented and attached to epic (or link to source)
• QE - automated tests merged and passing
• Docs - Downstream documentation is merged
• PM - all acceptance criteria are met (note: we want to start using the AC specific field, but please fill out below in the meantime)

Note: please also fill out the 'Acceptance Criteria' to indicate functional criteria aka scope, specific to this issue, that should be met in order to 'accept' the work to consider complete.