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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of asserting "here is what my environment should look like, and how it should behave."

However, What is the advantage of this over a configuration management tool (puppet, salt, chef, ansible, etc)? You can make similar operational state assertions with a CMS, and better, it will fix any problems it encounters when running.

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It doesn't always though, with chef/puppet et al, you can write the code to throw up X (aapche w/ ssl etc), but unless you use a testing facility, there is no way to know for sure (other than manually checking obviously).

You can dictate that a service is running, and it will ensure that the service is running. You can also set up more advanced HTML checks in at least some frameworks[1] to ensure that the contents are being served correctly.

[1] http://docs.ansible.com/get_url_module.html & http://docs.ansible.com/uri_module.html for ansible, I'm fairly certain you can build up something similar for puppet and chef, though I haven't done it myself.

Writing code/recipes/etc for chef/ansible/puppet is no different to writing code for an application. Just because you think you have dictated (in code) that things should be a certain way does not mean that what will be executed or run.

The exact same caveats could be applied to unit testing an environment. Common sense and practical tests rule any form of automation.

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