Infrastructure as Code, 3rd Edition

Chapter 18. Testing Infrastructure in Pipelines

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Chapter 15 described how to apply progressive testing strategies to infrastructure code. Chapter 16 then explained the use of automated pipelines to deliver infrastructure code changes. Now we can bring these together to look at how to implement automated infrastructure tests in the context of a pipeline. Figure 18-1 gives an example of a pipeline that progressively tests and delivers the code for an infrastructure stack that defines a compute cluster.

Figure 18-1. Overview of example pipeline stages

The compute stack pipeline includes different types of stages, each of which I’ll describe in more detail in this chapter. The idea of a pipeline is to optimize for fast feedback. So the earlier stages run more quickly by having a smaller scope. The later stages have a broader scope ...