Cloud engineering brings industry-standard software development practices to building, deploying, and managing cloud infrastructure. Testing is a common practice for evaluating software to ensure that it meets requirements. Similarly, infrastructure testing checks for missing requirements, bugs, and errors; it also ensures security, reliability, and performance. Testing uses manual or automated tools to identify bugs that can cause unexpected infrastructure behavior.

There are many benefits to infrastructure testing, including:

• reduced costs to fix bugs when caught early in the development lifecycle,
• discovering security risks and problems earlier,
• delivering a quality product that creates customer satisfaction through a great user experience

Testing shifts left the risk inherent with distributed architectures composed of many resources. Ultimately, testing increases release velocity, reliability, and confidence in your application.

This article is the first in a two-part series about testing infrastructure. The terminology for testing can be confusing because of broad definitions that overlap. This article will narrow those definitions that originated from application testing and apply them to infrastructure and cloud engineering. Let’s take a look at the different types of testing used with infrastructure as code.

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Hi everyone, I’m Hitesh Boinpally, a junior studying Computer Science at the University of Washington. I was offered the opportunity to intern for Pulumi over the past three months, and here’s how it looked!

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We regularly ship updates across the Pulumi ecosystem, with a release of the Pulumi CLI every two weeks, frequent releases of our cloud providers in the Registry, and regular updates to the Pulumi Service. You can read about most of those changes in the CHANGELOG.md files in each open source repository. To highlight some of the most exciting releases—including, for the first time, updates to the Pulumi Service—we’re trying something new: a regular release notes post for Pulumi release news, features, and updates. If you find it useful, or have ideas on how we could improve it, let us know on Twitter or in the Pulumi Community Slack!

In this update:

• New and updated cloud providers
  • Pulumi supports Amazon ECS Anywhere and Amazon App Runner
  • Pulumi supports Sumo Logic
  • 100 new resources in the Azure Native provider
• Pulumi engine and core technologies
  • Input parameters can now be marked as secret
  • Pulumi Packages: schema documentation and enhancements
• Pulumi Service and Pulumi.com
  • Easier acceptance of invites to organizations
  • Self-Hosted Pulumi Service now supports Azure Services and Minio storage

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Building an open-source framework for building serverless applications has many challenges, one of which is deploying cloud infrastructure resources. In this article, learn how Webiny uses Pulumi to enable its users to easily deploy and develop applications built on top of serverless cloud technologies.

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The central principle of cloud engineering is adopting software engineering practices. Refactoring is a technique for making changes to code that improve maintainability, enhance performance, scalability, and security without changing its external behavior. In devops, refactoring often occurs with modern applications; however, we can apply those same techniques to cloud infrastructure with infrastructure as code.

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When Amazon’s Elastic Container Service (ECS) first launched in 2014, it enabled an easy and convenient way of deploying and scheduling containers in the AWS ecosystem. Back then, you would run a set of EC2 instances, and ECS would deploy containers to instances based on the size, resources, and placement requirements you specified.

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There are loads of benefits to packaging up an application as a container. You can ensure that your application has all the required dependencies and runs in the isolated, predictable environment you expect. When it comes to running that containerized application, there are many options, including Kubernetes, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), and Docker. Often, running a container application at scale requires setting up a container orchestrator and providing network infrastructure to the containers. Configuring this can be complex, especially if you’re not familiar with virtual networking concepts such as virtual private clouds, load balancers, and the like.

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I was relieved to find Pulumi. Finally, we have testable Infrastructure as Code. We can write fast unit tests that we can execute locally without needing the cloud. However, I was a bit disappointed. Pulumi does not have a full representation of IAM Policy documents. Fortunately, it was relatively easy to build a library that did this!

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Danny Zalkind is the DevOps group manager for Skai, an award-winning intelligent marketing platform. He brings his 15 years of exprience of managing tech teams to his current role where he’s dedicated to allow Skai R&D to efficiently produce and serve software. You can find him on Linkedin.

Skai is an independent, global marketing platform for strategy, measurement, and best-of-breed activation across all of the world’s most influential digital channels. Skai’s solution provides data-driven insights and optimization technology to help companies make informed decisions and scale performance across critical publishers.

Skai possesses a highly technical engineering organization with over 350 software engineers, data experts, and DevOps engineers.

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Thank you for joining the PulumiUP event. We had a stellar set of speakers and panelists discussing the future of DevOps and how Cloud Engineering is providing the tools and processes that enable faster delivery, the right mix of architecture, and foster collaboration among teams in an organization. Here are some of the highlights and takeaways from our speakers.

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