Test Kitchen is an integration test framework for, among other things, Chef development. To create its testing environment, it builds on virtualization tools and cloud providers such as Docker, EC2, Rackspace and Vagrant. My own contribution – currently in 0.0.1 release, but undergoing active development – is kitchen-gce, a driver for Google Compute Engine (GCE).

Compared to other cloud providers, for use with Test Kitchen GCE has a couple of advantages, namely:

• (Subjectively) faster instance launch times than other providers; and
• Sub-hour billing.

One brief usage note:

Kitchen-gce uses Fog to interface with GCE. Fog’s GCE provider code has been undergoing development, and until then next releases of Fog and kitchen-gce come out (greater than 1.18.0 and 0.0.1, respectively), I recommend using the development versions of each. For instance, in a Gemfile:

group :integration do
gem 'test-kitchen'
gem 'kitchen-gce', :git => 'https://github.com/anl/kitchen-gce.git'
gem 'fog', :git => 'https://github.com/fog/fog.git', :ref => 'c5e6e2ae868b7fdec8e4fd8ef729fcab3b199b15'
end

If you use Test Kitchen, please check out kitchen-gce. Feedback, issues and pull requests welcome.

Acknowledgements: Google has currently given me a free trial plan for GCE, and has, as of this writing, covered about $0.18 of compute time on GCE used in developing kitchen-gce. I spent about $0.55 of my own money before that – sub-hour billing really does make economic sense…