Every enterprise trying to succeed in the digital economy is seeking for two things: speed and scalability. If it’s important for a company to get to market faster, it’s equally important to be able to scale up appropriately to support increasing customer demand. But the key motto that should be followed here is speed and security at scale.

Contents 1. What are Microservices? 2. How can an enterprise benefit from microservices? 3. Testing Microservices 4. Conclusion

Agile and DevOps models support distributed and decentralized ownership of software assets and promote faster turnaround of changes and rapid deployment. However, to skillfully segregate complex, monolithic applications into independent units, a design strategy namely “Microservices” is essential.

Monolithic applications were once effective in the digital economy, but not anymore. Development teams across enterprises have been struggling hard to deal with large applications pertaining to deployment, development time, and scalability. With the extensive adoption of DevOps frameworks and agile methodologies, development teams felt the necessity to break down complex application silos into simpler code blocks, which enlightens microservices.

Microservices has successfully made its mark in the software architecture market. The Microservices architecture differs from the traditional monolithic architecture where the application was built as a single entity. However the monolithic architecture is rather sound, obstructions around it are building precisely when almost all applications are being deployed on the cloud platform. Microservices architecture constitutes an integrated skelton where rather than plugging the components together, the software is fragmented by breaking it down into services.

By fragmenting a big application into microservices, development teams become more active with updates and deployments. Whereas, it also removes dependencies to create complex and large builds, by eliminating the need for over-sophisticated architectures.

Every enterprise has different needs; there can be times when microservices would be a good solution and, times when a monolithic application would make more sense.

For enterprises on a digital transformation journey, with the need to be agile, implementing a microservices architecture has several advantages in the app economy.

1. Easier to scale: In the microservices architecture, only the components that need improved scalability are affected, than the entire app. This also provides substantial cost savings to the enterprise.

2. A Grander architecture for larger applications: In this architecture, components can be built or swapped at will without having an impact on the entire application. In this case, if something goes wrong, only that component is affected.

3. Agility is the key: Microservices architecture provides more agility and makes it easier to pivot segments of an application.

However, microservices based applications also have:

1. Trouble testing the entire API app but becomes far easier to test individual components. 2. Extra moving parts than a monolithic app, which becomes difficult to monitor. 3. Extra modern back-end infrastructure requirements to the growing codebase.

Evidently, the testing strategy that is applied to the traditional monolithic application needs to change with the shift to microservices. Considering that applications that are built in the microservices architecture offer high performance and functionality, testing has to cover each layer of the service. A microservices architecture comprises of small, focused services that create a whole application together. Each illustration of a microservices represents a distinct responsibility within the application. The actual advantage is these services are independent of each other, which makes them independently testable. However, due to the disseminated environment of microservices development, testing can often become a challenge. Some of the challenges are given below:

• Accessibility of a dedicated test environment since development is agile and not integrated.

• Recognizing the right amount of testing each time in the test lifecycle

• Complex extraction logs during testing and data validation

Conclusion

Today’s DevOps and Agile-focused enterprises are endeavoring for fast changes and quick deployments. Microservices architecture is a boon to all these companies. Organizations can facilitate smaller development teams with more objectivity and agility, resulting the business being more in tune with their changing demands. At TestingXperts, we ensure that effective testing is implemented by the right set of testing specialists. Our intelligent test automation framework Tx-Automate ensures accelerated testing to provide you with higher productivity and the desirable time to market.

The post Achieving Agility and Scalability Becomes Reality with Microservices Architecture first appeared on TestingXperts.

The last few years have witnessed an insistent acceptance of new method named ‘Containers’ as organizations wish to deal with disruption at a faster pace. Containers have been around in the IT world for over a decade now, but the arrival of Docker made them more popular as it re-invented containers by adding a robust platform, integrated management tools, and code registry.

Contents 1. What are ‘Containers’ and why do we need them? 2. Containers and DevOps: What’s the connection? 3. Conclusion

What are ‘Containers’ and why do we need them?

Containers are the answer to the common problems faced by software to run consistently while moving from one computing environment to the other. This could be from a developer’s system to a test environment, or from a physical machine in the data center into a virtual machine in the cloud. Containers have become an integral part of the application development space, particularly in cloud computing. This is mainly because portability has been the biggest hitch in this space and given the proprietary nature of these public clouds, this method helps in abstracting applications into a virtual container that can be moved from one cloud to another.

The architecture of containers is an added advantage as it contains a standard method to divide applications into dispersed objects or also known as containers. This flexible approach offers more advantages around workload management and also offers the ability to make defect-tolerant systems. Containerizing the application platform can help in abstracting away the differences in the OS distribution. Another great benefit of containers is ‘modularity’ i.e., rather than running an entire application inside the container; the application can be split into different modules.

Containers and DevOps: What’s the connection?

You might have heard ‘DevOps’ and ‘Containers’ in the same sentence quite often Though, they are different concepts, but the effectiveness of containers makes it easier to enable DevOps workflows. Though DevOps is not tied to any particular technology; it can be implemented through any tool, it is convenient to implement DevOps with the help of containers.

-Containers have become an easy solution for the DevOps teams as it makes collaborating with various teams such as development, testing, and operation easier and convenient.

-Containers are able to support multiple frameworks, and it becomes easier to switch between different programming frameworks in DevOps.

-Rolling out application updates on a streamlined basis is required for a continuous delivery of software. When the application is distributed into multiple microservices, each one hosted in a separate container, you are able to update one part of the application by restarting the container without barging in the rest of the app.

While both containers and DevOps are helping improve software quality, the focus on automation and continuous delivery have been leading to various quality issues. Developers are often challenged with log files that are scattered in a variety of isolated containers each with its own log system dependencies. Continuous testing should be implemented to allow development teams to detect problems early on. If a continuous testing approach is not followed, fixing of errors will take much longer. TestingXperts’ intelligent continuous testing platform Tx-Automate has been enabling end-to-end automation of applications to enhance the quality of the software and increase speed to market. Connect with our Test Advisorsy services and allow us to help you build a defect-free and quality software/ application.

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Implementing automated testing has become a necessity to meet today’s agile environment. Repetition of software tests during the development cycles is needed to ensure quality. However, repeating the tests manually can be costly and time-consuming. Therefore, automated tests are preferred as they can be run over and over again at no additional cost and are agile than manual tests. QA managers have started implementing automated testing for accomplishing their tight regression testing cycles. The major advantage of automated tests is their capability to reduce the time from days to hours to run repetitive tests.

However, still, various QA managers and test engineers are reluctant to adopt or migrate to automated testing due to long training cycles and high investment. To overcome the test automation challenge, TestingXperts has an intelligent test automation framework ‘Tx-Automate’ that not only helps in performing a specific task, but also provides a solution where different tools can do their job in an integrated manner. In this infographic, we will showcase the key benefits of Tx-Automate.

Achieve Quality at Speed with ‘Tx-Automate

With ‘Tx-Automate’, TestingXperts helped a leading insurance company meet its functional and automated testing needs. Tx-Automate helped the client improve productivity, increase predictability, reduce testing cycle time, and lower testing costs.

Interested? Connect with us to build a comprehensive Test Automation strategy that brings specialized best practices to help you achieve your business objectives.

Recommended for you: Mobile App Automation: How Appium can add Value to your Application

The post Achieve Quality at Speed with ‘Tx-Automate’ first appeared on TestingXperts.