This guest place was written by Julian Dunn, Product Manager at Chef Software (@ julian_dunn)

In Greg Sypolt ’ searlier post on immutable infrastructure, he outlined exercise for treating your waiter more like oxen and not pets. It ’ s better to rebuild thing if you can preferably than spending kilocalorie on manually debugging and fixing long-lived servers. (Of course, you will inevitably have a few pets in your infrastructure; for instance, database host that actually hold client information that would be inconvenient to constantly reconstruct.)

Automation software like Chef can help with the provisioning and automatize setup of new cattle in a consistent way without having to resort to shell scripting or other ugly, hard-to-understand puppet. Chef can too facilitate you with maintaining consistency among the few pet servers that you do have.

For autonomous testing across multiple user personas, check out SUSATest — it explores your app like 10 different real users.

One trend we ’ ve seen in the pets-to-cattle migration is the exteriorisation of interface essay creature from long-lived, always-on test driver cluster to transitory instances or containers to motor UI tests, record the results, report them to a central splasher and so destroy themselves. These cloud-native try systems like Sauce Labs also provide a far richer set of functionality, like video recording and playback of the UI test, than can be achieved with artisanally-crafted, on-premise solvent. In other language, why messiness around with having to configure and maintain Xvfb, Selenium, Webdriver and so on, yourself, for a carload of platforms and platform versions when you can but use Sauce Labs?

One technological challenge to using a cloud-based testing solution like Sauce Labs is that many covering are internal-only. They may domiciliate behind a corporate firewall, unreachable from the Internet. That is why various years ago, Sauce Labs make the Sauce Connect proxy, which create a per-customer VPN burrow between a network with the application under test, and Sauce Labs ’ testing driver machines, allowing you to examine your national applications.

You likely want this VPN tunnel to be transient, and still treat the machines running the tunnel as kine too. This take a way to install, configure, start up and demolish burrow machines as ask. This is a perfect use example for Chef; enter theSauce Connect Cookbook, which does exactly that. By configuring a few simple attributes like your Sauce Labs user API key, you can easily achieve this aim. Chef can also be used to set up and manage all early aspects of your quiz infrastructure, like Jenkins or TeamCity servers and their build nodes, and even deploy the applications under examination into container runtimes or virtual machines. Hopefully this article has whetted your appetite plenty to convince you to extend the “ kine, not pets ” doctrine to your testing practices, as easily. You can see more about Chef and what it execute atwww.chef.io.

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