Going All In on Infrastructure-as-Code

Originally published in The New Stack Update.

Infrastructure code needs the same best practices used with application code, but as Dawn Foster told TNS readers, buggy software is foiling dreams of infrastructure-as-code. A recent survey by Justin Garrison, a systems engineer at Walt Disney Animation Studios, sheds light on how often continuous delivery and unit testing occurs. 43 percent of respondents said they deploy infrastructure code with a delivery pipeline — not shabby, but significantly lower than the 59 percent that delivers other applications with a continuous deployment pipeline. Almost a third say they perform unit testing of infrastructure code. If true, it would be surprising given that many developers downplay unit testing. Interestingly, three-quarters of the respondents that deploy infrastructure with a pipeline also perform unit testing. This makes us ask: if you are using Kubernetes to deploy infrastructure, are you also performing unit tests?