Key Reasons Why Cloud-Native Application Testing is Critical for Your Business

Cloud testing is key to navigating the challenges that business enterprises face frequently. However, it is not enough to test a cloud service and ensure it functions appropriately; one must also consider the non-functional aspects of a cloud service like security, compatibility, performance, environment management, and user experience. Modern customers expect ease of use, flexibility, and speed. It means you need to eliminate all frictions that might prevent you from testing your apps in the cloud. Cloud testing can help you accomplish this by providing a strategy for quickly and efficiently deploying a variety of applications/services into a broad range of public and private clouds.

Some of the prime reasons cloud-native apps benefit your business include avoiding vendor lock-in, building more reliable systems, ease of management, faster release pace, reduced cost via containerization and cloud standards, and superior customer experiences. Read more on why Cloud-native application testing is critical for your business and how to make a perfect test strategy to take your organization to new heights with it.

Test strategy for your cloud apps

Primarily, cloud-native apps are designed to run in cloud computing platforms' distributed and elastic nature. Engineers understand the utility of testing apps to ensure that everything functions properly before pushing it to production. That is why you must answer several questions concerning quality levels in apps. You also need to test the following aspects in your cloud-native apps: If the app can be deployed many times, if the app is scalable, or if the app is secure. Some of the unique features of cloud-native apps include:

? Always current and highly available

? Control elasticity of the cloud infrastructure

? Easily work with virtualized environment

? Easy to connect with cloud computing, storage, and networking resources

? Extreme automation

? Modular based on micro-service architecture

Adopt the following QA strategy with the different aspects that helps you add the features mentioned above to cloud-native apps.

Automation

The key to speed in cloud-native application deployments is automation. Automation makes software testing more straightforward because it can test a combination of deployment methods and testing functions at once. Microservices make integration testing difficult, but container services like Docker that package all code, configuration, and operating systems into containers make it easier to test. Containers make life easier for test automation by eliminating the need to set up and maintain many different configurations on your testing machines.

Auto-scaling

Auto-scaling helps ensure that cloud computing services can handle sudden increases in demand. The native apps must be aware of the scalability requirements due to dynamic load patterns and include them in the test strategy.

Dynamic environments

Note that parts of the app can run on many cloud infrastructures. In some cases, they can run across different cloud service providers. Consider latency, essential features, fail-over strategies, and recovery strategies for testing.

Metrics

Besides measuring your QA metrics, check to see if they are achievable and easy to troubleshoot during downtime.?

Resiliency

In addition to designing for failure, you should test how your designs handle failures. For example, test how well they deal with overload and whether or not they keep traffic routing as expected during these heavy load times. Also, make sure that some functionalities are not available during a high load.

Testing a cloud-native application

Many software testers and developers possibly test an app until they have stumbled upon some flaws or faults. This logic can be suitable if you see things through the lens of the seven testing principles that convey exhaustive testing is not possible.

If you want to know how often you test a cloud-native application, the answer is to try everything or nothing? There is no fixed number of tests that are ideal for any app. Even agile teams can’t test every possible combination in a highly complex app. Note that time and execution costs increase when running an exhaustive test in a cloud-native. Here, software teams need to reduce testing costs with increased testing efforts.

Three ways to reduce testing costs

Testing teams can quickly reduce testing costs by setting clear testing goals. Optimizing long-running tests and managing flaky tests in a meaningful manner. An overall testing strategy offered by a cloud app testing expert can help you become efficient, more focused, improve.?

Optimizing long-running tests

To optimize their test suites, software teams can split their tests into two categories: long-running tests that are run less frequently and short tests that are run after each change. Strategies like pairwise testing and cause-effect graphing help teams optimize long-running tests while streamlining the number of test combinations required.

Managing flaky tests

One way to manage cost is to build a system for detecting and managing unreliable tests whose deliverables may get in the way of running other tests efficiently. Unreliable tests or flaky tests can deliver conflicting outcomes (pass or fail) within the same environment. They can also hide bugs, lead to an unhealthy culture, slow down teams’ progress, and increase the overall cost of testing an application.

Set clear testing goals

Before the testing process commences, software teams should agree on all testing activities and the complete list of OS versions and platforms to test the software. This planned method can diminish the chances of failed tests, facilitate efficient resource utilization, provide a defined scope of tasks to be completed, make teams more productive, and highlight test cases based on their risk levels.

Summing up

Cloud app development and testing come with hidden challenges like integrating and seamlessly coupling multiple microservices and keeping data perseverance across various services. That is why testing experts need to know how they can take your enterprise to new heights with cloud-native app testing!

Agile and DevOps enable development teams to finish projects faster. Due to this, testing and development teams can test apps based on their requirements using cloud testing. This allows organizations to move toward digital transformation by improving flexibility and business agility. Consequently, organizations can introduce new strategies that encourage better workflows and faster turnaround time.