In my previous post about the Ralph Wiggum technique, Claude Code built a complete serverless URL shortener on AWS. The setup included Playwright MCP for end-to-end testing. It worked. But I kept wondering if there was something better for AI-driven browser automation. Then Vercel released agent-browser, and I had to try it.
When I was a kid growing up in Southern California, there was a phone number you could call to find out what time it was. It was a local number, 853-1212 (easy to remember as the arrangement of the numbers on the keypad made a capital T), and I used it all the time, to set my watch, adjust the alarm clock, fix the display on the VCR. I don’t recall the last time I used it, probably sometime in the mid ’90s, but I do remember clearly the sound of the voice at the other end of the line.
In the Testing Practices for Cloud Engineering article we discussed how to apply software testing methodologies to cloud engineering. We also examined testing regimes starting from the testing pyramid to the trophy and honeycomb models of testing better suited to distributed and cloud architectures. These testing regimes include three types of tests suited for cloud architectures:
In this article, we’ll do a deep dive into each of these testing methods.
When deploying infrastructure, we want to ensure that what we’re deploying matches our expectations. One way to do so is via unit testing. We’ve talked about this concept in previous posts, such as in this overview and this post on deployments with .NET.
Often, when we’re creating cloud resources, we want to ensure that a resource’s underlying assets match certain properties. For example, the entrypoint or handler for a cloud function should be an executable function. Similarly, objects we’ll serve as static assets on a website should not exceed a certain size. We can use Pulumi’s unit testing framework along with language-specific constructs such as introspection or filesystem calls to ensure this type of correctness. We’ll walk through some examples to show just how easy it is to do so.
Guest Article: Dustin Farris is an experienced cloud engineering consultant. He’s currently building a new data lake for a large public university using Pulumi. The project handles sensitive student and research data and as a result, his team must meet stringent QA and security requirements. Dustin shows how resource mocking in Pulumi makes testing and verification faster than ever before.
Because Pulumi uses general-purpose programming languages to provision cloud resources, you can take advantage of native tools and perform automated tests of your infrastructure. The full power of each language is available, including access to libraries and frameworks for testing.
This blog post takes a deeper dive into mock-based unit testing of Pulumi programs written in C# and F#.
We’re pleased to announce that unit testing with Node.js, Python, .NET, and Go is supported in recent releases. You can test resources before deploying your infrastructure using familiar tools and test frameworks. Check your resource configuration and responses without the wait of deploying them and speed up infrastructure development and production deployments.
Guest Article: Itamar Syn-Hershko, Founder and CTO of BigData Boutique shows how they use Pulumi to benchmark Elasticsearch configurations across cloud providers. Pulumi enables BigData Boutique to test deployments in parallel and gather metrics to produce performant and cost-effective solutions for its customers.
Testing your infrastructure using familiar tools like Node.js’s Mocha framework allows you to ensure configuration is correct before provisioning, and that the resulting infrastructure has certain desirable properties afterwards. This can enforce team standards, ensure security guidelines are being followed, and so much more. Because Pulumi uses general purpose languages, you can just embed tests alongside your infrastructure-as-code definitions themselves, using a familiar authoring style and reporting experience. In this post, we’ll explore the ins and outs of unit testing your infrastructure.