Top Microservices Testing Tools Testers Should Know About

Microservices have crafted highly flexible and adaptable IT infrastructures. Microservices is a unique software development approach that concentrates on creating single-function modules that work jointly to execute the same tasks. It enables you to alter only one service, without modifying the rest of the infrastructure. In simple words, one can easily deploy and change every service without affecting the functional facets of other applications or services. Instead of following an old monolithic architecture (sole app with manifold functions), testers and developers use this microservice approach to build independent modules for every function.

However, the microservice architecture can also make an app extra complicated, particularly when we add several functionalities. Likewise, testing the combined functionality of numerous services is a lot more complicated due to the distributed nature of the app. As microservices follow a dissimilar architecture, we also require an exceptional strategy for testing microservices. In this article, we will explore different tools for testing microservice applications. Testing microservices can assist us in eradicating several issues by avoiding a domino effect. 

Three things that one can stress while conducting microservices tests are as follows: 

•    Code must do what it ought to be done 

•    Give exact, speedy, and reliable feedback

•    Make entire maintenance simpler 

Few major benefits of Microservice Architecture:

•    Greater Scalability

As the requirement for certain services grows, it is perhaps possible to perform execution on distinct infrastructures and servers to meet your necessities.

•    Rapid Delivery

Through distributed development, microservice architecture empowers teams to develop numerous microservices at the same time. Due to the decrease of development cycles, microservice enables execution and updates to be performed more rapidly. Due to this fact, tester teams have extra time to market their product.

•    Defined Architecture

As big apps are broken down into smaller parts, testers can rapidly and easily understand, update and enhance those parts; in this way, rapid development cycles are acquired.

•    Resilience

The microservice supports independent development, employment, and operation of service. Hence, if an app follows the same approach, any collapse in an individual service wouldn’t affect other services in the app. The services boundaries of every single microservice safeguard failure of the complete app.

•    Easiness of Execution

Microservice apps follow a modular approach & every service is smaller than an old monolithic app. As a result, executing a single service is a lot simpler.

Some of the Famous Microservices Testing Tools

There are several tools obtainable for tracking, monitoring, and remediating microservices operation and design as required. Here are few popular microservices test tools commonly used in the industry.

• InfluxDB is a free application written in the Go language. It serves as a rapid, trustworthy, and highly accessible database optimized to retrieve time series data. Using this particular tool for performance test microservices can help you discover bottlenecks. 
• Apache JMeter is one of the highly effective and used performance test tools for testers. It is obtainable as an open-source, which makes it easily available to software businesses of distinct sizes.
• Gatling is a microservices test tool written in Scala, which allows it to perform simulations on many platforms. At the end of emulation, Gatling reports on metrics like active user numbers & response times automatically. This particular tool is generally used for testing the performance of microservices and web apps.
• Jaeger is an end-to-end, open-source distributed tracing tool that checks and troubleshoots microservices-centric systems. With tracking services across the software's operations environ, it can carry out root-cause scrutiny, examine key service dependencies and discover areas for optimizing performance.
• Hoverfly is an automated, open-source API communication simulation tool that assists with integration tests. The user can test how APIs react to precise events, like rate limits and latency in the network. It also runs test calls between microservices by emulating communications and then records responses and requests in proxy mode to confirm they work as expected.
• Pact is a contract test tool that monitors HTTP and message interactions to make sure apps are functioning in a consumer-driven contract manner. In essence, the consuming solutions dictate how the offering services should provide them the data they require. This service then constantly tests to make certain they stay in order with these contracts. Therefore giving a unique test method that has to ideally cut down on large unit testing.
• Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring solution that monitors resource use for apps or microservices deployed on Amazon Web Services. Thus, it can be a helpful tool if you wish to execute load tests for microservices.
• Grafana is a free metric visualization & analytics suite. One can use it to visualize time series data to notice how your microservices react under real-time traffic.

Choosing the right microservice testing tools can help you guarantee the best quality of software and bring a result that wins the market. Resolving an issue prior to it reaches the user will enormously increase your team’s and customer’s product confidence, and position your business up for success.