Test Driven Development of Chef Infrastructure Automation on Windows

By Robb Schiefer

Elevator Pitch

Chef, Kitchen, rspec, PowerShell, DSC and Pester make for a power combination when used together to write tests which drive the development of your configuration code. Come hear how we use this stack of tools to write our configuration code at EBSCO with high quality and you can too.

Description

Configuration management is currently all the rage in the DevOps space right now but few are investing in the quality of their configuration code like they do with application code. Yet, all the same benefits apply resulting in a faster feedback loop and ultimately cost/time savings.

In this session we will cover how to develop Chef cookbooks (with DSC resources) for Windows by writing rspec/Pester tests first. We will review how the red-green-red-green process ensures we have valid and useful tests. For good measure we will also show how mocking works to help isolate your tests. In addition to reviewing existing cookbooks, we will also write some new configuration code in the test-first style during the talk. 

Chef, Kitchen, rspec, PowerShell, DSC and Pester make for a power combination when used together to write tests which drive the development of your configuration code. Come hear how we use this stack of tools to write our configuration code at EBSCO with high quality and you can too.