Question

A DevOps team maintains their environment entirely with infrastructure as code (IaC). They want to catch problems before any resources are actually provisioned in a live cloud account, without spinning up real infrastructure. Which testing approach should they add EARLIEST in the pipeline to validate that the IaC will produce the intended resource changes?

Accepted Answer

Run a plan/dry-run step that previews the proposed resource changes and validates syntax against the target provider

Answer

Deploy to a full staging environment and run end-to-end integration tests against the provisioned resources

Answer

Perform a manual peer review of the pull request before merging to the main branch

Answer

Enable drift detection on the production environment to compare live state with the code