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Not sure if it is out of topic or not, the company I work for is doing some reorganization, and we setup an azure infrastructure team and individual product teams.

The big boss's idea is that individual product teams will look after their product from infrastructure to code. Then an azure infrastructure team will look after all the shared infrastructures (such as monitoring platform, azure private dns zone ...).

In this new team, we have 3 techi (2 were coders and 1 was IT) and 1 QA. However, I can't think of anything QA can do in a pure azure infrastructure team.

Say we created a Virtual network and use some dnslookup tool to make sure things are ok. Then what QA will do? Manually repeat what I just did? We can write some powershell script, but how to write some meaningful test cases so that QA guy can at least do something?

As I have always been a coder, maybe I am biased on this, so will be really helpful if people with more experience can give some guidance.

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  • if thats all cloud infrastructure team does then you don't need a team right ? can just give someone contract to set it up then use it as it is.
    – PDHide
    Commented Jun 21, 2021 at 20:55
  • Please add more details like what does this infrastructure team do , what was the need of a qa etc
    – PDHide
    Commented Jun 21, 2021 at 20:55
  • I don't know the need of QA now, he has been here as we were a purely coding team before. infrastructure needs monitor and someone will still need to maintain them, azure won't do that for you
    – daxu
    Commented Jun 21, 2021 at 21:08
  • Logging, monitoring, alerting could all be part of a QA's job. Depends how you split the work in your team, what he can do etc.
    – pavelsaman
    Commented Jun 22, 2021 at 8:16
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    can "QA guy" write code ? he could write automated smoketests, integration tests, powershell scripts to automate parts of the build process, setup monitor alerts, etc
    – ToastMan
    Commented Jun 22, 2021 at 14:42

2 Answers 2

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So there's a central team managing infrastructure for a lot of other teams each bringing in their piece. The pieces might somehow interact with each other, share database instances, stuff like that.

From what you describe, I see the QA for the central team as someone who will manage the testing/staging environment, organise multi-team integration testing, stuff like that. There's not much testing that can be done to infrastructure as code other than deploying it to a non-production environment and running sanity tests. If that environment is shared between applications and supported by infrastructure team, it makes sense for the infrastructure team QA to handle those post-deployment tests.

The tasks (other than communication/management) faced by this QA can and should (in cloud environment, probably even must) be highly automated, so the person who is mentioned as not a 'techi' might have a hard time; on the other hand that might be an amazing opportunity for them to learn something new and grow.

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Not sure it is helpful or not for other team.

Today I found this article, which explains how testing is involved in azure devop world. For me, it is very helpful, although our team may not be mature enough to do this yet. But certainly QA can do something.

https://markwarneke.me/2019-08-14-test-infrastructure-as-code/

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  • The article is about infrastructure as code as a team's product, the question is about the team building the infrastructure for the infrastructure as code itself
    – Rsf
    Commented Nov 21, 2022 at 15:10

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