The text discusses the importance and implementation of smoke tests within CI/CD pipelines to ensure that web applications function correctly post-deployment. Despite passing all initial tests in a CI/CD pipeline, applications can still fail in live environments, a challenge many development teams face. Smoke tests help by running basic checks on critical functions, providing early detection of major issues, and saving time and resources by preventing further testing if fundamental problems exist. The text provides a guide on integrating smoke tests into a pipeline using the smoke.sh framework or a Python-based approach with pytest, demonstrating how to validate that applications are accessible and functioning correctly after deployment. Additionally, it offers instructions for setting up a new environment using Pulumi and GCP for testing purposes, ensuring a clean setup and best practices for running these tests. Integrating smoke tests into CI/CD pipelines enhances confidence in application builds by verifying their functionality in target environments.