Gruntworks open-sourced their terraform, docker, packer etc. testing framework and I simply find it amazing. To my knowledge, there is nothing comparable out there. Let’s take a look at a simple example. You can find the code at https://github.com/datacisions/terraform-examples. What we will do: Write a terratest to check whether a particularly labeled EC 2 instance is there;  Run it an see it fail; Write the terraform code necessary to make it pass, to deploy the instance and label it. Run the test again to see it pass. Write a second, slightly more robust test for the same “component” (the EC 2 instance). […]

Let’s join Google Analytics with author data in Google Sheets, to display it nicely in Google Data Studio. Why? I write, so I’m naturally interested in evaluating content heavy websites. Content analysis usually consists of two parts: Looking at the data from the platform on which you distribute your content, e.g. your blog (who reads what, and how often?) Looking at the meta-data of your content (which topic, who wrote this, when, how long is it?) Those two pieces of information are usually stored in different places. (1) is in your web tracking software, e.g. Google Analytics, (2) is somewhere […]

Localstack is an awesome idea. It’s a locally run AWS mocking environment. It’s a cool thing to have if you’re developing an AWS based application. However, I stumbled across localstack because I was looking for ways to unit test my infrastructure. Even if cloud infrastructure is super fast compared to the “old school” way of infrastructure, for developing, it’s still pretty slow (try turning on and off a Redshift DB a couple of times just because you forgot to configure the security group properly). This is where localstack comes in for me. Let’s do some test-driven infrastructure development. A simple […]