Behavioural Driven Infrastructure

Presenter(s): Lindsay Holmwood
URL: http://2011.linux.conf.au/programme/schedule/view_talk/73

Does Behaviour Driven Development have a role in the infrastructure world? Enter Behaviour Driven Infrastructure where systems administrators can apply some simple open source tools and BDD principles to make infrastructure management more powerful, more insightful and deliver more value to their customers.

The typical enterprise monitoring and configuration management set-up for a website is:

Is the Apache package installed and the appropriate version?
Is the Apache service running?
Can I connect to the HTTP port and is HTML returned?
Multiply this by a few hundred iterations of hosts and types of services and youâre probably looking at your typical Nagios, Puppet, Cfengine, Hyperic set-up.

All this monitoring misses something critical though â weâre not actually monitoring that the service does what it should. Yes, it matters whether Apache is installed, the Apache service is running, and you can connect to HTTP but does this actually prove anything about the availability of the service weâre managing and providing for our customers? Nopeâ¦

We need to demonstrate more than just a check that says the Apache server is up. We need to demonstrate that the service delivered by that infrastructure was available to our customers AND functioning as intended.

Enter Behaviour Driven Infrastructure or BDI which applies the principles of Behavioural Driven Development to the management of infrastructure. In this presentation youâll learn:

How Behaviour Driven Development works
What makes a behavioural test
How to install and use Cucumber to perform BDI
Practical examples of behavioural tests in Cucumber, and
How to integrate BDI into your work flow and your enterprise monitoring and configuration management frameworks.

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