Most businesses today are shifting to cloud native architectures for the benefits it offers. Using a cloud-native approach, you stand to respond to customers faster, bring operations in line with business goals, and much more. Taking the cloud-native route also makes development teams flexible and enables dynamic change deployment with little effort.
However, cloud native web apps also bring with them their fair share of challenges. Chief among them is the fact that the distributed nature of these apps makes the architecture complex and as a consequence security and reliability of cloud native apps becomes a serious bottleneck.
That is why it is essential to perform cloud native application testing assiduously before deployment. Today, we’re going to take a look at how you can test your cloud-native web apps with success.
What Does “Cloud Native” Mean?
Cloud native web apps are a set of applications that provide interconnected services required to boost business performance. When we talk about a business taking the this route, we mean the development approach they take towards creating distributed software.
Cloud native apps are built to take complete advantage of cloud services such as Iaas and PaaS. As a result, most of these apps follow the microservices architecture model. This architecture allows you to optimize already developed systems, as well as scale up the process of creating new ones.
Perhaps the most enticing prospect of cloud native apps is that they can automate tasks across all cloud models. This leads to a number of business benefits, such as better scalability and improved cost margins.
Since cloud-native apps are developed and operated in a way that is entirely different from on-premise apps, their testing process is also different.
Advantages Of Using Cloud-Native Apps
If you’re still on the fence about using cloud native apps, then here’s a list of the advantages that you can get from using cloud native apps.
- Faster, more targeted release schedules
- Easier infrastructure management, scale on demand and where required
- Reduced cost of development through containerization using platforms such as Kubernetes
- Fault-tolerant systems
- Avoid vendor dependence
- Automatic scalability as per business needs
- Auto-provisioning features
- Allow multiple teams to work faster in parallel
- Allow faster deployment using DevOps/CI/CD pipelines
All the above benefits ensure that cloud native apps are becoming attractive for businesses of all sizes. However, it cannot be denied that cloud native apps bring with them exposure to new fault domains, and require you to manage increasingly fragmented microservices.
This is why it’s essential to deal with cloud-native app testing in a comprehensive manner. Testing not only helps to eliminate bugs and remove errors but also leads to better scalability, compatibility, and performance.
Cloud Native Application Testing Strategies
It’s no surprise that a continuous testing approach helps businesses to save time, money and create better products. As with anything, there are multiple ways to test a cloud-native app. Here, we are going to focus on the four major ones:
- Unit testing
- Component testing
- Integration testing
- End-to-end testing
Let’s explore each in some detail.
1. Unit Testing
Unit testing refers to testing each individual unit of the application in isolation. This helps to determine whether every piece of the application is working as it should. Unit testing is also useful in isolating faults in individual parts of an application and correcting them before integrating with the rest of the application.
Here’s a list of some of the advantages of unit tests:
- They are extremely fast and inexpensive
- They are environment independent
- They are easy to run and gleam results from
- They don’t result in an inadvertent code modification
Above all, unit tests are ideal for understanding the stability and reliability of the microservice components used inside a cloud application.
2. Component Testing
After all individual parts of a microservice have been tested, you need to run component-level tests on each microservice in isolation. This is done by testing each microservice individually.
Component testing allows you to analyze the performance and functionality of the microservices that make up the cloud app. This way, you can be sure that every microservice works exactly the way you need it to.
3. Integration Testing
This is exactly what it sounds like: integrating all the microservices together and testing whether they work in tandem. Integration testing helps to understand interactions between microservices, and how they communicate with each other.
Through integration testing, you can determine whether the services are working together to achieve the larger functional logic. This type of testing can also be used to check whether new features are compatible with existing apps.
4. End-to-end Testing
This is the hardest test of all to use. This level of testing requires evaluating the operation of the cloud app at the highest level of integration from the user’s perspective. As a result, these require the greatest time as well as resources. It’s also easy to lose focus when running such a test.
To ensure that it doesn’t happen with you, here’s a list of aspects to focus on during all the above levels of testing:
- App resilience
- Level of scalability
- Functionality
Bqurious platform allows you to create end-to-end tests spanning multiple apps and technologies easily.
Final Words
Truth is, no matter how much you test a cloud application, it’s highly likely that you have missed out on something. Unknown unknowns are a reality of cloud-native app development, and there’s always going to be something new cropping up after deployment.
That’s why it’s essential to adopt a continuous testing and improvement approach when it comes to cloud-native apps. Techniques such as chaos engineering, canary deployments, and observability help you take a proactive approach to cloud app testing.
Bqurious being a cloud native solution itself is uniquely placed to help you test your cloud native apps.