We mentioned Goss, a tool for provisioning testing, in passing in previous Radars, for example, when describing the technique of TDD'ing containers. Although Goss isn't always an alternative to Serverspec, simply because it doesn't offer the same amount of features, you may want to consider it when its features meet your needs, especially since it comes as a small, self-contained binary (rather than requiring a Ruby environment). A common anti-pattern with using tools such as Goss is double-entry bookkeeping, where each change in the actual infrastructure as code files requires a corresponding change in the test assertions. Such tests are maintenance heavy and because of the close correspondence between code and test, failures mostly occur when an engineer updates one side and forgets the other. And these tests rarely catch genuine problems.
