In today’s Cloud-native world, delivering reliable and scalable solutions hinges on one key capability: the ability to manage infrastructure through code. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) transforms infrastructure from a manual process into a programmable, repeatable, and testable asset – just like application code.
However, writing infrastructure code is only part of the equation. To ensure robust deployments, teams must adopt a consistent and automated approach to testing and validating changes before they ever reach production.
Why Testing Infrastructure as Code Matters
Testing infrastructure changes before deployment is not just a best practice – it’s essential for any mature DevOps process. It helps detect errors early, reduces the risk of service interruptions, and ensures that changes do not negatively impact performance or functionality. Automating this process further minimises the likelihood of human error and frees up teams to focus on delivering value, not debugging misconfigurations.
Consistent Deployment Readiness Processes
To effectively prepare for deployment, teams should implement standardised and repeatable processes:
- Deployment Readiness Checklist: Ensure each deployment follows a checklist covering all necessary validations. This includes confirming environment parity, testing status, approval workflows, and rollback strategies.
- Automated Pipelines: Use DevOps pipelines to provision infrastructure and release applications through tools like AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, Jenkins, or GitHub Actions.
- Multi-Stage Environments: Changes should progress through development, QA, staging, and only then production. At each stage, changes must be validated via functional and non-functional tests.
- Automated Testing: Integrate automated test suites – functional (e.g. Selenium, Cucumber), integration, and performance (e.g. JMeter) – into CI/CD pipelines.
Real-World Example
A robust example involves using AWS CDK to manage CloudFormation stacks across four environments: source, build, test, and production. Each change triggers a pipeline that performs comprehensive testing:
- Functional tests ensure infrastructure changes do not break application functionality.
- Load tests validate performance parity between staging and production environments.
- Canary deployments gradually roll out changes, with automatic rollback mechanisms if issues are detected.
- Dashboards alert the team and log all outcomes for auditability.
Automating Deployments with IaC
Manual changes through the AWS Management Console are prone to error and difficult to track. IaC and automation tools help enforce consistency:
- AWS CloudFormation & CDK: Define resources in version-controlled templates. Updates to infrastructure should pass through automated CI/CD pipelines, not manual console changes.
- Separation of Environments: Isolate environments for source, build, test, and production. Run automated test suites at each step before promoting changes.
- Rollback Plans: Establish clear rollback strategies for infrastructure failures, with monitoring and alerting integrated into the deployment process.
Key Resources to Enable This
Operational Readiness Review (ORR)
Begin with a set of questions to assess deployment readiness, covering testing, automation, approvals, and rollback strategies.
Version Control
Treat all infrastructure configurations as code, versioned and reviewed like any other software component.
Approvals and Governance
Implement gated approvals and peer reviews before any production change.
What Good Looks Like
A high-quality implementation of this approach would include:
- A deployment checklist document or screenshot.
- Architecture diagrams of the CI/CD pipeline.
- Detailed explanations of testing procedures and environments.
- Code examples or templates (e.g. AWS CDK or CloudFormation snippets).
- Evidence of automated rollbacks, monitoring, and alerting.
To scale reliably and serve customers with confidence, organisations must go beyond manual deployment practices. Automating infrastructure with IaC tools like AWS CDK or CloudFormation – paired with a strong testing and validation pipeline – ensures consistent, error-resilient deployments.
If your infrastructure code is not tested, it is not ready.
Achieving resilient, deployment-ready infrastructure requires more than just writing code – it demands clear operational standards, automated testing pipelines, and a culture of continuous validation. That’s where we come in.
Through our AWS Well-Architected Framework (WAF) reviews, we help organisations strengthen their infrastructure by embedding resilience, operational excellence, and automated best practices into every layer of their Cloud environment.
As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner, we can also help unlock AWS funding programmes to subsidise your review, making it easier to identify risks, strengthen recovery processes, and build customer trust before an incident ever occurs.
To set up a free AWS WAF consultation with us, visit our information page, or check out our AWS Marketplace listing below.
