As part of a nightly testing process, new version of an application is deployed to the set of web servers in the development environment. Which of the following is the BEST way to ensure the test…

Cloning development servers copies the current live state of development machines, which may have drifted from the previous night's test environment and introduces development-specific changes.

Predefined templates provision a standard starting point but do not capture or restore the specific runtime state that existed during the previous night's test run.

Undeploying and redeploying the application only addresses the application layer and does not restore OS-level, middleware, or other environment configurations that may have changed.

Configuration management tools such as Ansible, Puppet, or Chef apply idempotent declarative configurations that restore the environment to a precisely defined prior state, not just the application layer. This ensures OS settings, middleware, and all environment parameters are consistent and reproducible between nightly test runs, matching the previous night's configuration exactly.