Preproduction Deploys: Cloud-Native Integration Testing

TL;DR

This paper presents a cloud-native architecture for integration testing that enables independent deployment, routing, and testing of microservice components in preproduction environments, improving scalability, safety, and alignment with agile practices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel preproduction deploy architecture supporting independent routing, environment isolation, and safe testing of microservices before production release.

Findings

Supports canary, green/blue deployments, and roll-backs.

Enables testing with production-like data and environment.

Scales effectively with organizational size.

Abstract

The microservice architecture for cloud-based systems is extended to not only require each loosely coupled component to be independently deployable, but also to provide independent routing for each component. This supports canary deployments, green/blue deployments and roll-back. Both ad hoc and system integration test traffic can be directed to components before they are released to production traffic. Front-end code is included in this architecture by using server-side rendering of JS bundles. Environments for integration testing are created with preproduction deploys side by side with production deploys using appropriate levels of isolation. After a successful integration test run, preproduction components are known to work with production precisely as it is. For isolation, test traffic uses staging databases that are copied daily from the production databases, omitting sensitive data. Safety and security concerns are dealt with in a targeted fashion, not monolithically. This architecture scales well with organization size; is more effective for integration testing; and is better aligned with agile business practices than traditional approaches.