In a rapidly changing software-driven scenario, businesses need to switch to Cloud-native application development. And subsequently, comes the need for testing in a cloud-native environment.
What are Cloud-native applications?
Cloud-native applications are a set of specific inter-connected services built to deliver value to the business with continuous performance improvement. In other words, Cloud-native applications scale up the speed of developing new applications while optimizing current ones. It builds and delivers apps as per the need of users and their business goals.
A cloud-native app is designed to offer automated task management across public, private, and hybrid clouds. Businesses are increasingly opting for cloud computing for various reasons such as improved scalability and lower costs.
With Cloud-native application development – you can build and update apps swiftly than the traditional application building process.
Naturally, Cloud-native applications run differently than the ones deployed on-premises. Hence, testing apps built on cloud-native also differ from testing applications running at your data center.
Also Read: Distributed Cloud Computing: Benefits and Limitations
Here are 6 things you need to know about Cloud-native application testing:
Deploy DevOps methodology: In a cloud environment, teams work in sync and not silos with each team member working on some aspect of the same application. This may lead to new challenges for integration testing which can be handled by adopting CI/CD approach. Your applications are in a constant phase of testing. Here the DevOps teams use and implement CI/CD infrastructure and should focus on continuous testing.
While running a test: Cloud-native applications run in a flexible, dynamic, and distributed environment. You can scale them up or down as and when the need arises. Since cloud-native apps use several microservices it’s imperative to test against every service for better optimization in the real world. With Cloud-native software, you can also test non-functional requirements such as resilience, and scalability.
Test the resilience of your apps: An emerging trend to gauge the resilience of your applications is to induce process failure and see how the system reacts. Many businesses are deploying testing in the production environment to assess how the system recovers on the deliberate killing of a few processes. This is a great way to test the tolerance level of your app on random failure.
Resources being used: In a traditional on-premises environment, you are aware of the number of server resources in use but in a cloud-native setup you don’t know anything about the servers. If you work on an on-premises application development then chances are you know about the server application, network bandwidth and subsequently you can test against those possibilities. But what do you do in a cloud-native application environment? Due to its unpredictable and dynamic nature, it often gets difficult to run a test against the same. Besides, even after testing against the possibilities you never know what the outcome will be like. Solution? Keep on switching between different testing tools to assess the behavior of the application.
Be prepared to rollback: Developers who are working on cloud-native apps need to deploy software in a way so that they can easily go back to the previous version in case something unexpected happens. For multi-version testing, it’s important to keep a note of changes from one version to another.
Prioritize goals and infrastructure: In a cloud environment, it’s crucial to know that a few things will become more important than others and this makes it all the more cumbersome to know what are those things you need to test against. Depending on whether your application is open-ended or non-accessible, security becomes a critical testing area. But on the other hand, cloud computing also means that you don’t necessarily have to be responsible for the operating system and fix the glitches therein. So prioritize accordingly and know where to run the tests.
Also Read: App Service vs Cloud Service vs Service Fabric
Conclusion
It’s important to understand and familiarize yourself with the nuances of cloud-native application testing. You need to be aware of the challenges such as data consistency across services, integration of microservices, and more. For more information on the same get in touch with our cloud experts here.