Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef

Chapter 7. Next Steps

This book has begun the process of setting out a manifest for a radical way of approaching Infrastructure as Code. We’ve called infrastructure developers to start to treat their infrastructure code in the same way as other application code, and bring the same disciplines of test-driven development to it.

By now, you should be well on your way to being a confident infrastructure developer. You should have a firm grounding in the underpinning ideas behind Infrastructure as Code—why it’s a valuable pattern, and why its power needs to be harnessed and treated with respect. You should be in a position to develop Chef recipes and cookbooks and manage infrastructure via the Opscode platform, and you should have a good understanding of the fundamentals of how Chef works.

Beyond your understanding of Chef, you should be becoming familiar with some of the principles of test-driven and behavior-driven development, and should feel confident about starting to write some tests using Cucumber.

Cucumber-Chef is designed to be an enabler, which makes the iterative, test-first development model available to infrastructure developers. Until now, the underpinning infrastructure, time, expense, and complexity of trying to develop cookbooks and recipes in a more traditionally Agile fashion meant that few people could justify the investment. Now, with a single command, and for the cost of a few cents an hour, a fully-featured, self-contained test lab can be brought into existence from ...