Testing Infrastructure Code#

Infrastructure code has a unique testing challenge: the thing you are testing is expensive to instantiate. You cannot spin up a VPC, an RDS instance, and an EKS cluster for every pull request and tear it down 5 minutes later without significant cost and time. But you also cannot ship untested infrastructure changes to production without risk.

The solution is the same as in software engineering: a testing pyramid. Fast, cheap tests at the bottom catch most errors. Slower, expensive tests at the top catch the rest. The key is knowing what to test at which level.

Testing Strategy Selection#

Choosing the right mix of tests determines whether your test suite catches real bugs or just consumes CI minutes. There is no single correct answer – the right strategy depends on your system architecture, team size, deployment cadence, and the cost of production failures.

The Testing Pyramid#

The classic testing pyramid, introduced by Mike Cohn, prescribes many unit tests at the base, fewer integration tests in the middle, and a small number of end-to-end tests at the top.

Using Minikube for CI, Integration Testing, and Local Development Workflows#

Minikube gives you a real Kubernetes cluster wherever you need one – on a developer laptop, in a GitHub Actions runner, or in any CI environment that has Docker. The patterns differ between local development and CI, but the underlying approach is the same: stand up a cluster, deploy your workload and its dependencies, test against it, tear it down.