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.

Business Impact: New perception that Ansible is quick and efficient, and can allow for bulk deployments to speed up. Enables scalability with automation and use of more cloud resources.

Story

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.