Having learned the benefits of applying TDD to application code, my team decided to apply the same technique to infrastructure code. There isn’t quite as much literature available, and we faced many challenges, but we ended up with a rewarding result: a continuous integration server that runs tests at several levels, including acceptance tests. The technology stack involves Chef, Test Kitchen, Vagrant, KVM, Serverspec and Jenkins. Although each one of these parties has at least a good level of maturity, integrating all the blocks has been the interesting part. We discuss how to put together virtualization solutions, configuration management and BDD specs to converge into a fully automated continuous integration system that can and, in our opinion, should become part of the workflow for DevOp teams.

1. A developers' journey into building
automated tests for IT from the ground up
Stefano Rago @helmoltz

2. powered by

3. our scenario
users
permissions
backup
email
packages
web server
caches
dns
security
monitoring
and much more…
m

4. Infrastructure as Code?
0
350
700
1050
1400
2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
chef puppet ansible
m

5. Should we test infrastructure
code?
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
chef, puppet, ansible
test-kitchen, chefspec, serverspec, rspec-puppet
m

6. Should we test infrastructure
code?
Should we test infrastructure
code before writing it?
m

7. Should we test infrastructure
code before writing it?
m
reduced cost of maintenance

8. Should we test infrastructure
code before writing it?
outside-in approach
m

9. Should we test infrastructure
code before writing it?
code to the point
m

10. Should we test infrastructure
code before writing it?
loosely coupled code
m

11. Should we test infrastructure
code before writing it?
easy to refactor
m

12. Should we test infrastructure
code before writing it?
safety net
m

13. Should we test infrastructure
code before writing it?
short feedback loop
m

14. Should we test infrastructure
code before writing it?
well designed code
m

15. Should we test infrastructure
code before writing it?
documenting
m

16. to have a Continuous Integration setup that runs tests at all
levels every time we update the configuration of our IT, giving
us feedback about our changes, and catching issues early
m

17. The building blocks
Virtualization
Configuration management
Test framework
Continuous Integration
m

18. The building blocks
Virtualization
Configuration management
Test framework
Continuous Integration
KVM, Vagrant
Chef
Test Kitchen
Jenkins
m

19. The building blocks
Unit
Integration
End-to-end
m

20. The building blocks
m
Chefspec
Serverspec

21. Demo
m

22. Benefits of this setup
m

23. The journey has just started
!?
m

24. m

25. Thanks
@agilosoftware @agile42@helmoltz
m