Synthetic Infrastructure Testing with Canary Checker and Flux
Flanksource Canary Checker integrates with Flux to enable synthetic infrastructure testing, allowing teams to validate that infrastructure changes and deployments behave as expected through automated, continuous testing of system components.
Background
- **Canary Checker** is an open-source tool from Flanksource for synthetic monitoring: it runs automated health checks (HTTP, DNS, database, etc.) against infrastructure and services, alerting when something fails.
- **Flux** is a popular GitOps tool for Kubernetes: it keeps a cluster's state in sync with a Git repository, so changes are deployed automatically when code is merged.
- **Synthetic testing** means simulating user or system interactions (e.g., hitting an endpoint, querying a database) to verify that infrastructure is working correctly, even when no real traffic is flowing.
- This article shows how to combine Flux and Canary Checker: use Flux to deploy Canary Checker's check configurations (stored as YAML in Git), so infrastructure tests are version-controlled, automatically updated, and tied to the same GitOps workflow used for the rest of the cluster.
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