If you’re a System Administrator, you’re likely all too familiar with the 2:35am PagerDuty alert. “When you roll out testing on your infrastructure,” says Seth Vargo, “the number of alerts drastically decreases because you can build tests right into your Chef cookbooks.” We sat down to discuss his upcoming talk at Velocity, which promises to deliver many more restful nights for SysAdmins.
Key highlights from our discussion include:
- There are not currently any standards regarding testing with Chef. [Discussed at 1:09]
- A recommended workflow that starts with unit testing [Discussed at 2:11]
- Moving cookbooks through a “pipeline” of testing with Test Kitchen [Discussed at 3:11]
- In the event that something bad does make it into production, you can roll back actual infrastructure changes. [Discussed at 4:54]
- Automating testing and cookbook uploads with Jenkins [Discussed at 5:40]
You can watch the full interview here: