Writing code is the easy part of software development. The real challenge comes when your system is running successfully in production.
How do you test new functionality to make sure it works as intended and doesn’t break something? When a problem arises, are you able to identify the root cause and fix it quickly? And as that system keeps growing and evolving, are you able to focus on one small area without having to understand everything?
These challenges exist whether you have a monolithic or microservices architecture. Organizations that build distributed systems have to adopt testing and observability practices that differ from those used when building a monolith.
This eMag takes a deep dive into the techniques and culture changes required to successfully test, observe, and understand microservices.
Free download
The InfoQ eMag - Microservices: Testing, Observing, and Understanding includes:
- An Overview of 12 Useful Testing Techniques - When building a microservice system, you will need to manage inter-dependent components in order to test in a cost and time effective way. You can use test doubles in your microservice tests that pretend to be real dependencies for the purpose of the test. However, there are many options for implementing this. This article provides an overview and tradeoffs of 12 techniques.
- Examining the Tradeoffs of 12 Useful Testing Techniques - A successful microservice testing strategy must effectively manage the interdependent components involved. This article presents the tradeoffs for twelve testing techniques. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. Which technique, or blend of techniques, should be used for your application, depends on your context.
- 6 Case Studies with a Combination of Testing Techniques - This article presents six real world use cases of testing microservice-based applications, and demonstrates how a combination of testing techniques can be evaluated, chosen, and implemented.
- Q&A with Tyler Treat on Microservice Observability - Tyler Treat attempts to disambiguate the concepts of Observability and Monitoring. He discusses how the complexity of elastic systems produces more unknowns that require a discovery-based approach. InfoQ recently sat down with Treat to discuss the topics of observability and monitoring, and he shares some challenges and best practices when introducing observability concepts.
- Obscuring Complexity - One of the most important things that software architects do is manage the complexity of their systems in order to mitigate release disruption while maintaining sufficient feature velocity. When we cannot reduce complexity, we try to hide or shift it. Software architects tend to manage that complexity with the time-honored strategies covered in this article.
InfoQ eMags are professionally designed, downloadable collections of popular InfoQ content - articles, interviews, presentations, and research - covering the latest software development technologies, trends, and topics.