Mar 9, 2023
The key to developer-first, shift left adoption of modern microservices testing is ease of use. Throwaway tests — common today — are the opposite of easy. When we started Skyramp we knew that reproducibility was essential. Define once, use continually would make debugging easier during feature development, and much easier for the rest of the team down the road. They could benefit from the frictionless sharing of these cloud native application tests.
So this is a bit of an historical walk through of our thinking and building process. In the beginning, our primordial solution required the developer to create a few things: container descriptions (one for each of the services under test), a target description (the collection of services under test), and a test description (the desired test types and parameters). This has changed since then, but this is where we started.
For many of our design partners, this entry cost was an issue. We kept hearing the same gripe: I get test descriptions, but why go through the trouble to create container and target descriptions when much of this information already exists, for example in our helm charts?
Now, sometimes a partner’s helm charts are more monolithic than modular. Even massive. And the last thing a developer like this wants to do is to manually create subset charts, given the original is always changing and the source of truth. Wouldn’t it be great if he could simply specify the subsets of the charts he’d like to use for testing from the original? Could we solve this problem without container or target descriptions? Just test descriptions to guide Skyramp towards the best way to test a feature. And like that, our thinking changed.
Point is, when it comes to disrupting testing, let “easy” be your guide on your journey to shift left.