A Microservices Outcome: Testing Boomed
A microservices outcome of the past five to ten years: testing boomed.
It boomed as more people just needed to test microservices. Microservices and the rise of Kubernetes reflected the shift from large application architectures to approaches that broke services into little pieces, said Bruno Lopes of Kubeshop.
Kubeshop is a Kubernetes company incubator, Lopes said. They have six different projects that they created in the Kubernetes. Lopes is the product leader of the company’s Kubernetes native testing framework, TestKube.
The ability to test more easily means it is more accessible to everybody. People feel more comfortable with testing due to the better developer experience. For example, automation improves product quality, especially as people have more time to differentiate than perform manual tasks.
Teams use Kubernetes; they develop applications there but then don’t test the applications where they live, Lopes said. They have the old ways of testing, but they also want to push out new features. Developers move fast — often faster than the organization can change its methodologies. Modern testing methods get adopted, but it takes time for the organization to adapt.
Lopes said no one should ship anything that did not get tested before it goes into production. Secondly, a company should establish an environment resembling production where you can run all your tests and deploy applications. The environments are never 100% the same, but they can be similar to deployment.
“And make it very fast,” Lopes said.” You shouldn’t make your development team wait for manual QA to make sure everything is all right before deploying. It should deploy as fast as soon as you can. You should deploy without waiting for manual tests.”
Take the SRE team, for example. They need to respond fast to issues. They want fast debugging. The more they spend time looking at the problems, the more downtime for their customers.
Sometimes, especially in critical systems, the applications cannot be exposed to the Internet, Lopes said. That means it becomes essential to run the tests in Kubernetes itself. A matter that will take time for companies to understand, of course, accelerating as the developer experience improves.
