From Manual Deployment to IaC: Pain-Free Test Infrastructure

Test benches often appear “somehow”: manually, according to the instructions in the wiki, with unique settings that only one person in the team knows. As a result, environments drift, break down at the most inopportune moment, and it takes too long to prepare them. In this report, I will describe how we applied Infrastructure as Code to deploy the test infrastructure and turned this process into a reproducible and manageable pipeline. I'll show you how the Terraform + Ansible + Proxmox bundle helped us automate the creation of virtual machines, setting up environments, and preparing booths for testing and development tasks. Let's talk not only about what happened, but also about the problems we faced: VM templates, state storage, idempotence, configuration management, access rights, the cost of errors, and resistance to manual habits. The report will be useful to QA, DevOps, SRE, developers and team leaders who want to get predictable test environments and reduce manual operations.