Infrastructure Validation: Scenario-Based Questions

Infrastructure misconfigurations can lead to security vulnerabilities, outages, or excessive costs. Detecting them before deployment improves safety, compliance, and operational efficiency.

🔍 Pre-Deployment Validation Techniques

• Static Analysis: Use IaC security scanners (e.g., tfsec, Checkov, Terrascan) to catch misconfigured resources in Terraform, CloudFormation, or Kubernetes manifests.
• Policy-as-Code: Enforce organizational rules using OPA (Open Policy Agent), Sentinel, or Conftest.
• Drift Detection: Compare declared vs actual state before applying changes.
• Change Review: Require code reviews and CI checks for all infrastructure changes.

🧪 Testing Infrastructure Code

• Unit Tests: Validate modules with tools like Terratest or kitchen-terraform.
• Plan Validation: Run terraform plan or pulumi preview and verify the output in CI.
• Sandbox Deployments: Spin up temporary environments for smoke tests.

🧰 Tools for Detection

• tfsec / Checkov: Detect insecure or misconfigured Terraform resources.
• Infracost: Estimate cost changes pre-deploy.
• OPA / Sentinel: Enforce compliance (e.g., “no open S3 buckets”).
• KICS / Regula: Scan across IaC formats including Docker, Terraform, CloudFormation.

✅ Best Practices

• Make security and cost checks part of the CI pipeline.
• Use version-controlled IaC with peer review on all pull requests.
• Fail CI builds on critical violations or policy breaches.
• Tag and annotate infrastructure for traceability and cost attribution.

🚫 Common Pitfalls

• Deploying directly from local machines without testing or peer review.
• Relying only on production feedback to detect issues.
• Ignoring warnings or skipping dry-run steps in CI/CD workflows.

📌 Real-World Insight

Mature teams treat infrastructure like application code — tested, reviewed, and linted before it ever reaches production. Pre-deploy validation protects uptime, budgets, and compliance.