From Monitoring to Automated Testing of Your Infrastructure Code

Don't have time to write automated tests for your infrastructure code? Don't see the point? Or don't know where to start? This talk is for you.

Now we're writing code to manage our infrastructure with tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible etc, we are effectively developing software. One of the wonderful aspects to this is that we have the world of software development quality best practices to draw on in order to achieve a high rate of change while not compromising on reliability. Writing tests for infrastructure code (and having them execute automatically as part of a continuous integration pipeline) is a key element to this, and is the focus for this talk.

But how do you get started on this? What are some tools to help? How should we think about this problem? This talk will provide an overview of the different types of tests that can be written, from small unit tests to integration and acceptance testing. It will focus on integration testing where existing monitoring checks can come in handy, or at least provide a crossover or an entry point. In some cases the tests can also be used as checks in the monitoring system.