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Cloud Native Application Testing 101

A Complete Guide to Cloud Native Application Testing

Introduction

Applications that are specially created and built to make use of cloud computing platforms are known as “cloud-native” applications. These applications are developed utilizing a set of guidelines and tools that support scalability, resilience, and agility in a cloud setting.

Cloud-native application testing refers to testing practices and methodologies that are specifically created for cloud-native architecture-based apps. Cloud-native apps are often built with microservices, containers, and serverless computing, and are orchestrated by platforms such as Kubernetes. These applications are very scalable and resilient, and they can fully utilize cloud computing resources.

Cloud native application platform

Testing services for cloud-native applications enable effective development and automate every aspect of management across hybrid, public, and private clouds. Being cloud-native has a lot of additional advantages.

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Key advantages of Cloud-native Applications:

Agility and Faster Time-to-Market
Rapid development, deployment, and iteration are made possible by cloud-native applications. Developers can swiftly bundle and deliver new features or bug fixes with the help of infrastructure automation and containerization. Businesses may react to market changes more quickly, publish updates more frequently, and gain a competitive advantage thanks to this agility.

Cost Efficiency
Cloud-native applications optimize resource utilization by scaling up or down in response to actual demand. This elastic scaling enables organizations to allocate resources as needed, eliminating the excessive expenditures of over-provisioning. Furthermore, cloud-native architectures make use of cloud provider services, which reduces the requirement for on-premises infrastructure investments.

Better management
This is another added benefit of cloud-native application testing, as it helps to make infrastructure management much more effortless. Businesses need not further worry about factors like allocating storage, configuring networking or provisioning cloud instances since serverless platforms like AWS Lambda and Azure functions are implemented.

Collaboration and Communication
Cloud-native testing promotes teamwork and communication among development, testing, and operations teams. Effective communication channels and collaborative tools aid in the timely sharing of test plans and results, as well as the resolution of concerns.

Automation and Continuous Testing
Cloud-native testing focuses on test automation and integration into the continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. Automated tests allow for frequent and rapid testing, ensuring that every change is thoroughly tested before it is deployed to production.

Applications with higher levels of Resilience and Fault Tolerance
Cloud-native applications are built to be resilient in the face of failures. Because of its distributed architecture, if one service fails, the rest of the application can continue to work, offering a higher level of fault tolerance and lowering the impact of failures on the overall system.

Scalability
Another great benefit of cloud-native application testing is its scalability. Cloud-native applications are built to scale easily. Applications can dynamically distribute resources based on demand by leveraging technologies such as containerization and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes. This enables applications to effectively handle varying workloads, providing optimal performance and responsiveness.

Auto-Provisioning
Another added benefit of cloud-native application testing is that it supports auto-provisioning. When the apps are in need of some resources, they automatically self-service via programmatic provisioning. This enables applications to run smoothly, without any requirement of manual intervention. Cloud-native application platform also furnishes renewed runtime surroundings for operating the applications securely and at scale.

Higher availability and Disaster Recovery
Cloud-native applications use built-in techniques like load balancing and auto-scaling to provide high availability and handle growing traffic. Furthermore, cloud providers offer sophisticated disaster recovery options, allowing organizations to copy and back up data across many regions, assuring business continuity and lowering the chance of data loss.

Flexibility and Portability
Cloud-native applications are platform-independent. They can be implemented on a variety of cloud providers or even on-premises. This flexibility enables organizations to select the cloud provider that best suits their needs while also allowing them to swap providers if necessary.

Currently, the tech world is booming with cloud-native applications. As most enterprises are moving towards the cloud as fast as possible, considering the vast benefits it provides. As cloud technology successfully presents itself with the added ability to be agile and scale at demand.

The Thought Frameworks way of cloud native testing

Cloud-native testing ensures that cloud-native applications are of the highest quality, operate optimally, and scale efficiently. It enables organizations to develop dependable and robust applications that capitalize on the benefits of cloud computing while minimizing risks and guaranteeing a great end-user experience.

Definition
Cloud native application Testing Services can be defined as Testing each component individually as well as end-end workflow.
Significance
The increasing Importance of Cloud-Native Application Testing
Cloud native testing is critical for handling the challenges of cloud native applications. However, it has been demonstrated that deployment models, service models, and other key characteristics of cloud computing can have a significant impact on cloud testing approaches or strategies. Other non-functional aspects that should be addressed by the testing teams include performance, security, compatibility, environment management, integration with various interfaces, user experience, and much more. Embracing the Cloud Native testing approach enhances DevOps in Software Development Life Cycle by including agile practices for cloud development and it can be based on cloud-native infrastructure.
Thought Frameworks Cloud-native application Testing Approach and Testing Strategy

We focus and design our testing approach based on the following Cloud-native principles:

1. Microservices
2. Containerization & Orchestration
3. Continuous Integration &  Continuous Delivery
4. Automation
5. DevOps

We at Thought Frameworks combine various testing methodologies and practices to ensure comprehensive validation of the application’s functionality, scalability, performance, resilience, and security.

1. Understand Cloud-native Architecture

  • Get a deep understanding of the principles of cloud-native architecture, such as microservices, containers, orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, and serverless computing.
  • Understand how these components interact and how they impact testing

2. Define Testing Objectives

  • Define clearly testing objectives based on the requirements of the cloud-native application
  • Identify critical quality attributes such as scalability, performance, resilience, security, and availability that need to be validated

3. Determine the test types and levels of testing required

  • Unit Testing – To ensure they behave as expected, test individual microservices, functions, or components in isolation.
  • Integration Testing – Verify and validate how various components and microservices connect and communicate with one another.
  • Performance Testing – Assess the application’s responsiveness, throughput, and resource usage under different workloads.
  • Scalability Testing – Examine the application’s capacity to scale dynamically by adding or removing resources as needed.
  • Security Testing – Determine vulnerabilities, check access restrictions, and shield private information.
  • Resilience and Fault Tolerance Testing – Create failure scenarios to test the application’s fault tolerance, resilience, and recovery capabilities.
  • End-to-End Testing – To ensure that all components function together flawlessly, test the complete application workflow from the end-users perspective.
  • Compliance Regulatory Testing – Verify that the application adheres to relevant regulations and compliance standards.

4. Test Environment Setup

  • Create test environments that as closely resemble the production environment as you can. To accurately recreate the cloud-native environment, use infrastructure-as-code (IaC) methods, containerization platforms, and orchestration tools like Kubernetes.

5. Test Data Management

  • Manage test data efficiently by employing methods like artificial data generation or anonymization. To ensure thorough testing, develop a variety of datasets that address various scenarios and edge cases.

6. Test Automation

  • Make use of cloud-native-specific test automation frameworks and technologies. This enables automated test execution, promotes continuous testing, and enables frequent deployments.

7. Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD)

  • Integrate testing into the CI/CD pipeline to ensure that tests are run automatically throughout each build and deployment. This provides for quicker feedback and time-to-market.

8. Monitoring and Observability

  • Use monitoring and observability technologies to collect application metrics, logs, and traces. During testing, this allows you to acquire insights into the application’s behavior, performance, and potential issues.

9. Collaboration and Communication

  • Encourage development, testing, and operations teams to collaborate and communicate effectively. To establish a unified picture of the application’s quality and to handle concerns quickly, share test plans, results, and conclusions.

10. Continuous Improvement

  • Learn from test findings, feedback, and user experiences on an ongoing basis. Retrospective sessions should be held to identify areas for improvement in testing strategy, tools, and processes.

11. Chaos Engineering

  • Consider applying Chaos Engineering practices, which involve introducing controlled failures into the system to evaluate its resilience and detect potential flaws.
3 Key areas to focus on in Cloud-native application testing

Following are the 3 key pillars of Cloud-native application testing which Thought Frameworks focuses on and includes as a part of the Testing Strategy are

  1. Scalability Testing
  2. Resilient Testing
  3. Security Testing

By focusing on the above important 3 pillars we ensure that the Cloud-native applications are delivered with high performance, availability, and data protection while leveraging the advantages of cloud computing.

Scalability
  • Service scalability
  • Usage of cache
  • Cache performance across services when requests are stateless
  • Consequences when instances are no longer required
  • Dynamic Environments

Analyze how the feature is deployed and the key distributed elements to the system
Cross-examine the availability of feature dependencies
Identify the feature recovery process.

Resilience

Kubernetes can perform rolling restarts but how do we gracefully shutdown and release client threads

  • Understanding overloads on the nodes when traffic is being routed.
  • Understand the system deterioration rate.
  • System responsiveness when legacy systems are unavailable
  • Capturing metric requirements
  • Archived and searchable logs
  • Traceability of application.
  • Robust Automation
  • Validate deployment simultaneously
  • Negative task-based scenarios are performed in terms of scalability and reliability.
  • Frequent and predictable high-impact change
  • Identifying the service dependencies including any breaking changes
  • Continuous delivery over Continuous deployment
  • Running end to end tests while a deployment is in progress
  • Rollback strategies
Security
  • Authentication and Authorization
  • Data Protection and Encryption
  • Secure Communication
  • Infrastructure Security
  • Container Security
  • API Security
  • Compliance and Regulatory Requirements
  • Secure Coding Practices
  • Logging and Monitoring
  • Third-Party and Open Source Component Security
Repercussion
What happens when you don’t do Cloud-Native Testing?

Cloud Native Application Testing has numerous points of failure due to a large number of moving components, which are loosely coupled. Failures can occur for a number of reasons and can impact the business in the following ways –

  • Releases are delayed or slow.
  • Infrastructure management is a challenge.
  • Cost of Infrastructure Increases.
  • The System’s Reliability is Affected.
  • Issues with Scalability.
  • Inefficient Resource Utilization
  • Poor User Experience
  • Deployment and Operational Challenges
  • Compliance Risks
  • Lack of Resilience
  • Poor Performance
Thought Frameworks Cloud Native Testing Service

With the introduction of tools to orchestrate applications in different settings, the possibility is offered to automate the execution of our native cloud native test strategy within these pipelines.

The quality assurance team, developers and product owners work collaboratively to contribute to ensuring that the best value is achieved. The Cloud Native Test Quality Assurance Charter and the principles of chaos can help to ensure that production is reliable.

Cloud-Native DevOps Testing
Ways to Implement Cloud-Native DevOps Testing
  • Aligning with the microservices patterns
  • Using Containerization
  • Following a declarative communication pattern
  • Deploying container orchestration
  • 12-factor application principles are employed while writing the code
  • Increasing automation in CI\CD pipelines
  • Exposing health check
  • Collecting telemetry data
The Thoughframeworkers and their Experience in Cloud Native Application Testing

Adding value to Cloud Native Application Testing requirements:

  • Increasing the number of development cycles
  • Ensuring Resilience And Ease Of Execution
  • Better Scalability

About Thought Frameworks

Thought Frameworks is a U.S. based leading QA and software testing organization that’s been in business since 2009, armed with the ultimate solutions for all your software’s QA testing challenges. Having headquarters both in California, USA, and a fully functional well equipped QA Test Lab in Bengaluru-India, that delivers premium QA and QC services endlessly across different Industry domains and niches. An ISTQB Silver Partnered Company, our superhuman test team has delivered numerous successful QA and QC projects for clients across the globe. Get powered by our deep dive bug hunting process that helps your software in clocking release cycles on time while delivering excelling quality and functionality.
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