Continuous Integration (CI) is not just for application developers. Operations teams managing infrastructure code, configuration templates, and deployment scripts benefit enormously from CI practices that automatically test changes before they reach production systems.
Testing Infrastructure Code
Set up a CI server like CruiseControl or Buildbot that monitors your infrastructure code repository for commits. On each commit, run syntax validation on configuration files, execute unit tests for deployment scripts, and perform lint checks on shell scripts and configuration templates. These automated checks catch errors that manual review often misses.
Create a staging environment that mirrors production as closely as possible. After passing syntax and unit tests, automatically deploy infrastructure changes to staging and run integration tests that verify services start correctly, configurations are applied as expected, and inter-service communication works properly. Only after passing all tests should changes be approved for production deployment.
Maintain a visible build status dashboard in the operations team area showing the health of all infrastructure code branches. Failed builds should block deployments to production and trigger immediate notification to the committer. This fast feedback loop dramatically reduces the time between introducing a defect and discovering it, making fixes simpler and less risky.