All new Partner Solutions and updates are validated by our internal automated validation and integration (CI/CD) system. As part of this process, the CloudFormation templates go through mandatory automated testing through an open-source tool called TaskCat. TaskCat deploys your AWS CloudFormation template in multiple AWS Regions and generates a report with a pass/fail grade for each Region. You can specify the Regions and number of Availability Zones you want to include in the test, and pass in parameter values from your AWS CloudFormation template.
TaskCat is implemented as a Python class that you import, instantiate, and run. It was developed by the AWS Integration & Automation team to test AWS CloudFormation templates for Partner Solutions. We make the tool available to all developers who want to validate their Partner Solution templates during development or test their custom AWS CloudFormation templates. The TaskCat repository is available in GitHub.
TaskCat supports all major Linux distributions and Mac OS X versions. If you are using Windows 10, we recommend that you install Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), and then install TaskCat within the WSL environment. For details, refer to the TaskCat Installation instructions.
For an example solution that uses a TaskCat test file (.taskcat.yml), refer to the Linux Bastion Hosts solution sample TaskCat project.