Testing Infrastructure Code: Best Practices and Common Mistakes

With the cloud, infrastructure such as networking, security, virtual machines, and much more is entirely software code now. Instead of manually creating cloud environments for applications and making changes, administrators write code to do that work. When changes are needed, that code is enhanced and re-run. Just like application code, infrastructure code needs to be tested. After all, code that introduces defects into existing environments can put developers, testers, and even end-users out of service. That said, most organizations do not adequately test infrastructure code. Anybody in this space realizes that our ability to test infrastructure code in a comprehensive way has limitations due to costs, current tooling, and outside dependencies. I'll provide insight as to what those limitations are and how to maximize the benefit for the tests you write. This presentation targets DevOps professionals with infrastructure code experience with any cloud and their managers. Attendees will leave with ideas for improving testing of infrastructure code and be able to avoid common mistakes.