Manage Infrastructure as Code with Chef

Sometimes, you need to deploy software for tests with special licensing terms. To solve this, AWS offers Dedicated Instances and Dedicated Hosts - and now you can use them with Test Kitchen 3.14 in your developer workflows.

Test-Kitchen is a tool to manage your test machine lifecycle, similar to HashiCorp Vagrant. While it has been developed with Chef in mind, it can be used with any development tool to test on new machines every time you change your code. As this tool continues to evolve and many examples are outdated, today I will give you some small snippets to reuse and get going quickly.

Recently, I spent a lot of time using the exciting new member of the FSx family. One detail made working with it a bit unpleasant, though - the lack of log files. This post details how to create a custom integration into CloudWatch Logs and make ONTAP audit logs visible.

Recently, I got a bug report for the kitchen-vcenter driver, which allows lifecycle management of testing VMs on VMware vCenter environments. Apparently, a customer tried to create a VM without any network interface. The problem was that this crashed in a very unintuitive way. But it made me wonder: Would it be possible to use non-networked machines for tests? It turns out: That’s absolutely possible!

It is time for a follow-up to my blog post from last year - especially as Test Kitchen 3.0 changed some defaults. Let’s check some cargo-culted settings out in this blog post.

Currently, users of Chef are limited to working with the platforms supported by the Chef core. But with the advancements of Target Mode, the story could change quickly. Learn about the idea of a “Platform Support Pack” and what it could mean for the future.

While Infrastructure-as-Code slowly becomes omnipresent, many of the communicated advantages of the approach stay mostly unrealized. Sure, code style checks (linting) and even automated documentation get more common every month. But one of the cornerstones often gets ignore: testing. Let’s see which types of code testing are available and how to do it without writing too much code. The promise of the Infrastructure-as-Code (short: IaC) movement is to handle infrastructure just as if it was a program.

We, as tecRacer, thrive on our individual and unique employees. In our new series “Insider Stories” Terraformi will tell you how it found its way to the company as well as how it experiences working for tecRacer.

To our pleasant surprise, Chef awarded tecRacer the “2021 Technology Partner of the Year” title at the opening keynote of ChefConf 2021.

With CDK you create Infrastructure as Code - IaC. You can automate the test for the IaC code. The three test tastes -Unit, Integration and Application- should work closely together. Here I show you how. It is like the three steps of coffee tasting: 1 smell, 2 Taste, 3 Feel.