Meetings and Events

Shell scripts are a great tool for both building and testing services, but they are not the only choice. Sometimes your team needs to describe infrastructure into existing and building your own DSL can be a distraction from your goals. Something like Ansible is still a fine choice for these situations. Once you have chosen to use Ansible, you next have to choose how to verify what you are building. You could

• verify manually
• verify by writing a general program (shell, python, etc)
• verify by using molecule

The demo part of the talk will show how molecule and testinfra can be utilized to test your infrastructure code.

The discussion part will be about why testing infrastructure code is a lukewarm tech topic at best. Why aren't other people as excited about its possibilities as me? What are the practicalities of these tests (e.g. costs, time to develop, etc)? How do these tests inform monitoring? Why isn't the idempotence of Ansible sufficient? How much coupling and anti-DRY do infrastructure tests involve?

This talk is compatible with all BSDs but is not limited to them.

ref:

• https://molecule.readthedocs.io
• https://testinfra.readthedocs.io

Raul Cuza is a systems administrator but some of his best friends know how to code.

One of his first accomplishments after college was deploying a fleet of JavaStations in a K-12 school giving the faculty and students their first wide spread access to email, word processing, and web surfing. He quickly learned that being the sole person in an organization who understood how to administer UNIX, no matter how thin the clients, did not lead to a good work life balance. And, thanks to Citrix, he learned that even when an OS is virtual, you still have to manage it.