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Things you need to know about cloud-native applications

Testing cloud-native applications

By james kimaruPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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Things You Need To Know About Cloud Native Applications

The number of people, businesses and organizations going for the cloud to solve IT problems is increasing. To add on that, everyone is relying on the digital resources, making the demand for the applications to grow. When it comes to combining these two cloud concepts; computing and applications together, the result you get is the cloud native application and the partnership is very productive.

What’s comes into your mind when you hear about cloud native applications? If you have no idea then read on. This article will guide you through to understand the whole concept.

The meaning of cloud native applications

It is a set of detailed inter-connected services made to provide value to the business with a constant performance improvement. In other terms native cloud is an application established with cloud-based technologies and completely held and managed in the cloud. The application operate in the cloud from end to end. It balances up the speed of emerging new applications while enhancing the existing ones. It shapes and delivers apps as per the necessity of users and their business goals.

The application is fashioned to offer automatic task management across, private, and hybrid clouds. There are many business choosing cloud computing for several reasons such as low cost and better scalability.

It is possible to build and update an apps faster compared to the old application building process through cloud native application. The cloud native applications operate differently compared to the ones deployed on premises. Henceforth, testing apps built on cloud –native is different from testing applications running at your data centre.

Here are several things you need to know about testing cloud native applications.

Going cloud –native

This the method of designing, architect and building circulated software apps in order to enjoy full advantage of the platform as service and infrastructure service provided by the cloud service providers.

These apps are most developed as set of small micro-services which are founded on the micro-services architecture style. The micro-services architecture permits distribution and growth of application. As delivered set of services, which result to a perfect match with the distributed nature of cloud. The micro-services are loosely coupled designed, they run on containerized orchestrated platform in environment offered by the public, private and hybrid clouds.

The main reasons why companies are going cloud-native are;

 Significant application downtime reduction.

 High resiliency.

 Improved growth velocity.

 Scaling-down of cloud resources utilization as per business needs.

Developed With Best-of-breed Languages and Frameworks

Cloud native application is multi lingual. Every service of a cloud-native application is established using language and framework which work best for the functionality. Services uses different languages, runtimes and frameworks. For instance designers may design a real-time streaming services based on web sockets, established in node .js, while selecting python for building a machine learning based service and selecting spring –boot reveling the REST APIs. The fine way to establish micro-service let them select ideal language and framework for specific job.

Use of devOps methodologies

When it comes to cloud application development environment, teams work dependently instead of working independently. Every team have different branches of an application where they work. This can create new challenges for integration testing which can be handled by adopting CI/ CD approach. Your application are in continuous stage of testing. To focus on constant testing, the DevOps teams should implement CI/CD infrastructure.

Running a cloud native test

Running cloud native application is manageable, dynamic, and distributable to environment. You can gauge up or down when necessity arise. Since cloud native application uses several micro-services. It’s important to carry a test against every service for improved optimization in the real world. With the help of cloud-native software it’s possible to test non-functional wants, for example resilience and scalability.

Test the resilience

Resiliency is when a system fail and is able to recover from its failures and continue to work. It’s not evading failures, but responding to the failures without downtime or data loss. Resiliency is to bring back the application to a fully functioning after a failure

One way to measure the resilience of you application is by using emerging trend to induce process failure and observe how the system behaves. Various business are organizing testing in the production unit to check how the system becomes restored on the deliberate killing processes. This process is a big a way to assess the patience level of your app on random failure.

The resources that are used

When you compare traditional on-premises environment and the cloud native-set up, it’s clear you will know the number of server in use but as opposed to native cloud you know nothing about the server. When one works on-premises application you will be conversant with server application, network bandwidth and then you can carry test against those possibilities. But when it comes to cloud-native application environment you cannot predict how the outcome be like. It is difficult to run a test against the same due to its dynamic nature. It’s good to keep on exchanging between different testing tools to check the performance of the application.

Contract testing

Both the individual and independent micro-services are used, when there is need for the teams to do contract testing. The micro-services consist of two parties the producer-service component and consumer-service component. Service contract (having of the predictable input and output) will be created when consumer will try to pair with the interface of a provider to use its output. Automation test suites ,containing of the contract test, can be increased into the integration pipelines, once run, they will show whether any change in the provider or consumer component is up to the lever of the service contract between them or not. It’s significant to test cloud-native applications by creating and running contract tests.

Consider rollback

Kubernets services allows you to dynamically change the versions of containers. The outcome is that developers working with cloud applications need to consider creating an app in a different way. When you install a software you are considering that you can back to the older version, including multiple versions of an application at the same time. If you test multi-version scenario, keep track change from one version to another.

Conclusion

It’s imperative to understand and familiarize with the shade of cloud-native application testing. Know the challenges like data consistency across services, integration of micro-services and many more

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