What are the major things a QA should know regarding CI/CD processes and AWS stuffs

I’m sure learning about these in detail is not necessary for us, but we certainly need to have ideas. Can anyone briefly tell me what things should be learnt, and if there’s any resources or sites or courses that would be a great help. I don’t want to dig in these topic very deeply I just want to learn what’s important from the perspective of a QA or Automation engineer.
Thanks in advance :blush:

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There is a free course AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials - about 6 hours will give you some insight so at least you can be aware of some of the jargon talking with the team.

How much deeper than the basics of AWS really depends on your company needs but it can add a lot of potential value. If you are in charge of environments its worth learning deeper including configuration and optimization.

For CI/CD you should really know what is happening fairly well on this, different companies do this differently but talk with your team to get beyond the generic things available online.

For automation you are going to need to know how to integrate and use this so I’d recommend you learn it well.

If you are automating system monitoring rather than just a UI scripter, again that requires knowledge.

Some of the testers I work with have gone to deeper certifications in this area and can pretty much set up the environments and CI pipelines with monitoring and configuration as part of their role.

I personally see this as a decent path for testers as it aligns with some testing goals of accelerating the whole team forward.

Generally start with the basics and see where it takes you.

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A very general question, but to me a major take away was that the concept of production like environment changes dramatically in a world where you can quickly create a new environment. This enabled a whole new range of strategies on how to deal with setups in testing.
And the other aspect would be that if you have infrastructure as code you might want to think about how you test that too. Infrastructure as code - Wikipedia

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Definitely get developers to demo or show the infrastructure and make sure you don’t take on too much responsibility, but make sure people in your dev team are reviewing any deployment scripts and control scripting you do. Not used it for a few years now, but AWS is pretty neat, and easy to organically learn, while so easy to get lost in.

I’d suggest finding project scope to take time out for learning much more than essentials, since a good course can teach you and your team things they did not know about how to manage your AWS resources. For example security and basic networking are always going to be areas you can get better training and benefit, more from than the rest of your team. This will help you a lot on the CI/CD ideas side. A nice chance to add a skill, not just “get by with enough”.

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For starters you could look into the following:

  • How to integrate tests into the pipeline

  • A bit of version control, like git, so you know about branches, commits, merges, pull requests, etc.

  • Overview of build tools, how to trigger a build, scale an environment, how artifacts work

  • Take some courses from Dave Farley on Continous Delivery

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@andrewkelly2555 @ola.sundin @conrad.connected @mirza
Thank you for pointing out all these. I’ll definitely take note on all these. In case I find anything confusing still, will write it here again.
Thank you

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