Running smoke tests on your stack

How do we know whether our application is healthy once it is deployed?

In addition to monitoring, logging, and alerting, there is a method called smoke testing.

Smoke testing is a method of testing that is applied during or after an application's release. It helps us to understand whether the current release is functional or whether it contains several bugs or failures that require immediate rollback.

CloudFormation has an out-of-the-box rollback feature. As we know, it will roll back our stack to the previous healthy state if at least one of the changes could not be applied or a resource cannot be created. From the perspective of AWS, it is usually an AWS service that reports that the resource creation has failed and that the error we are seeing is actually an error message from AWS' API. However, some resources are not reported on if they have failed to create by design.

Smoke testing for EC2 auto scaling groups

For example...