Efficient cloud computing testing strategy for your business
Cloud computing testing is an essential part of the cloud-based software delivery workflow. It utilizes all the advantages of cloud applications to ensure minimal time-to-market for new product features. Cloud-based test environments can use the full range of benefits of cloud infrastructure:
- They are virtualized. They run atop a virtual infrastructure (Terraform clusters, Kubernetes clusters), which greatly speeds up infrastructure provisioning, as compared to the manual configuration of testing server farms.
- They can be versioned. The needed resources are allocated with the help of easily-configured textual files — manifests. These manifests contain all the settings required to provision the test environments and can be adjusted and versioned like any other code.
- They are automated. Cloud testing environments work best when running automated unit and integrity tests. They are suitable for all other kinds of testing too, but their primary value lies within the capability to be a part of a CI/CD pipeline. This way, every new code commit can be automatically built, tested, pushed to the staging environment and released with one command.
- They are continuous. Every IDE, test environments, staging environments, and production environments are built using the same manifest. This effectively removes the “works on my machine” situation, which was a plague of software development for decades
- They are reproducible. Every cloud environment running in a Docker container is built from the same Docker image. This means there are no configuration errors throughout the software delivery pipeline and your product code works in the same conditions on all software development stages.
As you can see, working with cloud computing testing environments can be very beneficial for your business. However, achieving these results is possible only under the condition of a clear and thorough understanding of the ways the cloud architecture functions and the best practices of organizing cloud-based workflows and CI/CD pipelines.
The core difference between cloud-based testing and traditional testing farms of dedicated servers or virtual machines is that cloud test environments can be quickly provisioned or shut down to save resources and are always available on-demand, as simple as running the required manifest. Quite the opposite, on-prem testing servers or virtual machines must be manually reconfigured should any changes of parameters be required. This makes cloud testing much less time-consuming and much more cost-effective, as compared to Git-flow testing done on-prem.
The only downside here is the need to have a thorough understanding of the cloud infrastructure architecture, deployment and configuration, which is required to organize cloud computing testing workflows effectively. Such expertise is hard to come by and is impossible to obtain through reading cloud platform knowledgebases, as it is based on real-life use cases your IT department must accomplish. Therefore, most of the businesses that want to use cloud computing testing to its full extent have to obtain some external help in order to build a viable cloud testing strategy.
Such a strategy must be totally different from a Git-based workflow, as it uses a completely different approach to testing and works with a completely different set of roles, tasks and responsibilities.
Differences between Git-flow and cloud-based software delivery
In traditional software development, a developer writes a batch of code for a new feature and “throws it over the wall” for the QA engineer to test. If a test environment for this feature is readily available, the Quality Assurance specialist can begin working at once. If not — he must submit a request to the Ops engineer or system administrator to provision and configure the required test environment. He might also need to reconfigure the environment on the move, as the requirements for security testing, performance testing, integrity testing, functional and non-functional testing of your new code can differ quite a lot.
Should the testing be successful, the code must be moved to the staging server to ensure it does not crash any previously operational functionality. After that, it can be released to production — and this is the best-case scenario. In the worst case, the QA engineer finds some bugs and the code is thrown over the wall back to Developer for bug fixing. Due to this, software development is quite unreliable and releases of new product versions are infrequent and cannot be reliably aligned to any schedule.
The worst part of it is the fact that no matter how thorough your quality assurance regime, some bugs can remain undetected and surface in the production environment only. This is due to the fact that there are pretty significant discrepancies between the characteristics of IDE, testing, staging and production environments, and some of the edge conditions cannot be humanely foreseen or predicted during testing. This leads to notorious post-release crashes and urgently delivered hotfixes – the things we all love so much, right?
The cloud-based testing strategy is quite different. The developer writes automated unit and integrity tests for the new code before writing the code itself. All the new code batches are then run against the existing test codebase. Every code commit enters an automated CI/CD testing pipeline, where it is consequently run against all the required test environments to meet the demands of integrity, security, performance, and all other kinds of testing.
If all the tests are passed successfully, the code is automatically pushed to the staging server, where the QA specialist can check the latest build against the high-level testing approaches — regression, user acceptance, etc. If these tests are successful, the code can be pushed to production and released seamlessly without any downtime. This is possible due to automated CI/CD pipelines deployed and configured by the Ops specialist — a DevOps engineer, to be precise.
Designing and implementing an effective cloud testing strategy is centered on implementing the CI/CD pipelines, where the output of one stage automatically becomes the input for the next stage. This essentially leads to a situation where every code commit can become a mini-release and the latest product version is delivered to the customers seamlessly through in-app updates whenever they reload the app — the way it works with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and any other popular cloud-based tool or platform.
IT Svit has ample experience with implementing exactly this aspect of DevOps services, as we are one of the top 10 Managed Services Providers worldwide and have more than 10 years of expertise in providing web development and QA services, 6+ years of DevOps services and 800+ successfully accomplished projects. All the aforementioned ensures our capability to develop a cost-effective cloud computing testing strategy for your business. Should you need assistance with this kind of task — let us know, we are always ready to help!
