The growth of innovative technologies and API architectures have widely enhanced Microservices adoption. Increasing customer demands and the need to avoid disruption in application performance have augmented microservice based architectures like never before.
Even international brands such as Amazon, Netflix and Uber have abandoned their traditional monolithic architecture to implement more agile and scalable microservice applications. This wide adoption and increased benefits of microservices have been winning traction across enterprises and are predicted to see a more powerful pace in adoption for the years to come. The industry independence of this innovative architecture has helped more sectors to aim and achieve better enterprise coordination, therefore, bringing in a system that is more efficient than the monolithic architecture.
Microservices are the new API
As businesses aim to solve domain-level problems, API gateways notice powerful adoption beyond sectors. An Application Programming Interface Gateway is a reverse proxy that presents microservices as APIs. As the title suggests, it operates as a “gatekeeper” between consumers and microservices. Common characteristics of an API Gateway incorporate the capability to validate requests, administer privacy and security protocols, load stability between backend settings and suppress them if necessary.
Though it might appear like a comprehensive solution to completely avoid traditional monolithic architectures, IT services need to be more modular and autonomous.
As a consequence, microservices will require to co-exist with the conventional monolithic architectures and communicate with the existing processes. Furthermore, it will additionally need to be in sync with agreement imperatives for more reliable outcomes. To simply put, with businesses possessing diverse other architectural systems already implemented in various domains, completely eliminating the traditional architecture could begin a new set of difficulties. Therefore to make sure that the new microservice based application coexists efficiently with traditional applications, proper testing strategies must be implemented. Since the enterprise will have limited time to deploy microservices solutions, they must leverage a more faster testing strategy.
Enter Microservice Automation Testing!
What is Microservices Automation Testing
Artificial intelligence based microservice test automation supports the design of reliable tests scripts, automated report generation, and much more. It therefore significantly reduces the time needed for test creation, analysis, and maintenance. The application testing process must check the reliability of not only individual API performance but also the inter-service communication, test communication pathways, and all other linking modules.
To ensure the effective performance of an application, the test automation process needs automating at three different levels: unit layer testing, service, and user interface (UI).
However, with microservices, QA teams and test experts may not only be aware of the service they test but also its interconnected or interlinked dependencies. Due to the modular characteristics of microservices, links between each microservice must be tested at different levels of operation, with the unit, component, and integration testing.
Unit Testing
It assists in verifying the code of application modules at a unit level to make sure that they comply with the complete business strategy.
This is the area in test automation services where the most substantial number of unique test units are concocted and is exceptionally essential in microservices testing.
For efficient and precise microservices testing, it’s imperative to restrict to minute test units. Larger more comprehensive units could result in randomly complicated tests as the microservices increase resource consumption as it takes more time in testing.
Integration Testing
For microservices applications, integration testing is carried out to support the interaction between subsystems that communicate with outside elements such as data stores and other servers.
Since microservices interact and administer simultaneously to achieve a business purpose, tests must consider requests passing through the services to make sure information channels perform as expected.
Component Testing
As the title implies, component testing is leveraged to test a component or the individual services of an application. The test simulates microservices by testing them under real world conditions that match the deployed services when used by millions of customers around the globe. It assists in verifying the interaction between distributed services and their dependencies, such as a database and third-party integrations.
Conclusion
The emergence of COVID-19 has accelerated digital adoption for businesses and enterprises like never before. Even the general public is more dependent on applications and software nowadays than they used to be a couple of years back. This has significantly increased the stress on application developers to deliver efficiently working solutions with faster time to market and more cost effectively. Test automation is a technology that can essentially help enterprises release applications that are 100% error free and at a much faster rate than manual testing.
Especially testing individual APIs for microservice based applications will be time consuming and might need the coordination of more than one tester. Test automation completely eliminates this by generating automatic test scripts, predicting errors and solving errors by itself. Therefore it is imperative that every mobile or web application developer leverages the multiple benefits of test automation to release better quality products at a much faster time to market and lower costs.