Best Testing Strategies in a Microservice Architecture

1
Best Testing Strategies in a Microservice
Architecture
2
Introduction Today, there is no dearth
of information related to microservices on the
web about what they are and how
organizations are transforming their development
architecture. However, there are very few
articles that talk about the test strategies that
must be followed while testing microservice
architectural solutions and applications. This
blog aims to help you provide the
information. Before I continue to the Strategy,
Test Areas, Test Types, etc., let us understand
some of the definitions of microservices.  A
microservice is a software development technique
variant of the Service Oriented Architecture
(SOA) style that structures an application as a
collection of loosely coupled services. In a
microservices architecture, services are
fine-grained, and the protocols are
lightweight. A microservice architecture builds
software as suites of collaborating services.
Microservices are often integrated using REST
over HTTP. They connect with each other over
networks and make use of external datastores. 
3
Microservice architecture, or simply
microservices, is a distinctive method of
developing software systems that try to focus on
building single-function or singlepurpose
modules with well-defined interfaces and
operations. This trend has grown popular in
recent years as enterprises look to become more
Agile and move towards a DevOps and continuous
testing approach. Microservices can help create
scalable, testable software that can be delivered
very often some of them as frequent as weekly
and daily.  Microservices architecture allows
admins or users to load just the services that
are required, which improves deploy times,
especially when packaged in containers. Microservi
ces provide changes only when and where they are
needed. With a microservices architecture, the
application monitors each functional
component. Why do you need a special strategy to
test microservices?  You need a different
strategy to test microservices as they follow a
different architecture and have a lot of
integrations with other microservices within
ones organization as well as from the outside
world (3rd party integrations). Additionally,
these require a high amount of collaboration
among different teams/squads developing
individual microservices. Moreover, they are
single purpose services and are deployed
independently  regularly. 

4

The Strategies  Before I discuss the
various strategies, let us take a look at a
self-explanatory diagram to understand the
composition of microservices.  Different
types of testing need to be performed at
different layers of microservices. Let us look at
them using an illustration of three microservices
collaborating/working closely. Read Full Blog
at https//www.cigniti.com/blog/microservices-ar
chitecture-testing-strategies/
5