Infrastructure as Code brings software engineering practices to infrastructure management. Testing IaC catches misconfigurations before deployment—but infrastructure testing differs from application testing. Terratest provides a Go-based framework for testing Terraform, Kubernetes, and other infrastructure tools.
Testing Approaches
Unit tests validate individual modules with mocked dependencies. Integration tests deploy real infrastructure and validate behavior. End-to-end tests verify complete environments work as expected. Balance test thoroughness against execution time and cost.
- Test Terraform modules in isolation before combining into larger configurations
- Validate that deployed resources have expected properties and configurations
- Test failure scenarios ensuring infrastructure handles errors gracefully
- Use test fixtures to manage test state and cleanup
- Run tests in isolated environments preventing interference with production
CI/CD Integration
Infrastructure tests run longer than application tests—plan CI pipeline stages accordingly. Use parallelization for independent tests. Clean up test resources reliably to prevent cost accumulation. Consider test account isolation preventing test failures from impacting other work.