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 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 provide a useful starting point. After this talk attendees will: * better understand the value of automated tests for infrastructure code * be motivated to write tests and implement CI pipelines to execute these tests automatically * know how to get started with some suggested tooling

1. From Monitoring to Automated
Testing of your Infrastructure Code
Jesse Reynolds, Puppet
Virtual Puppet Camp Australia, April 2020

2. @jessereynolds
jesse.reynolds@puppet.com
Principal Professional Services Engineer

3. Infracode?

4. Writing tests has been a best
practice in software
engineering for a while now...
• syntax & lint
• unit
• integration
• acceptance

5. Infrastructure code is
software, so you should
write tests for it too

6. “Reasons” to not write
tests…

7. "It takes too long to write
tests"

8. "Who is going to run
them anyway?"

9. Why bother?

10. Let me tell you a story…

11. There was this bank.

12. Both classes get applied.

13. The IP addresses are not
determined correctly.

14. All machines now have
1.1.1.1
and that’s not how you TCP/IP*
*unless you’re Cloudflare

15. What went wrong?

16. What could have been
done to prevent this?
• Code review?
• Unit testing?
• Integration testing?
• Acceptance testing?

18. Testing to the rescue!

20. Unit or acceptance
testing?
“I’ve decided code unit tests aren’t worth the trouble and end
state testing is easier for most people to grasp. Have just written
my first resource extension for InSpec yesterday and am off and
running.” - a sysadmin near you.

21. OK, what do we need?

22. Provision a machine.

23. Apply your code to the
machine.

24. Execute the tests.

25. Examine the exit status.
Zero good.
Non-zero bad.

26. The test harness
Time to make some choices

27. Beaker

29. Test Kitchen

32. kitchen-ansible

33. Serverspec

34. describe interface('eth0') do
its(:ipv4_address) { should match /10.0.3./ }
end

35. Could you re-use your
monitoring checks for
infacode CI testing?

36. Rspec

37. Rspec

38. You could dream of
going on holiday.

39. Demo

40. Thank you for listening!
@jessereynolds
Questions?
What’s your org doing?

41. Image acknowledgements
https://flickr.com/photos/marcoccia/44692926914/ - Base Jumping in Idaho
https://flickr.com/photos/jaseblair/6913029766 - Nelson Lakes National Park