Red Hat Allies With Docker, Inc. for Testcontainers Cloud Framework
At the Kubecon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference this week, Red Hat announced it has extended an alliance with Docker Inc. to provide access to Testcontainers Cloud from the Red Hat OpenShift platform deployed on Kubernetes clusters.
Docker, Inc. CEO Scott Johnston said the goal is to simplify the process of building and deploying higher-quality cloud native applications using an open source Testcontainers framework the company gained via the acquisition of AtomicJar late last year.
The Testcontainers framework uses Docker containers to create more real-world testing environments by, for example, invoking instances of databases, message brokers and web browsers from within an integrated development environment (IDE). The approach eliminates the need for IT organizations to set up their own staging environment to test applications because developers can now more easily test applications themselves or within the context of a continuous integration (CI) workflow.
Testcontainers Cloud, which supports more than nine programming languages, is designed to be installed in a developer environment in less than five minutes and does not require knowledge of Docker commands to invoke.
The overall goal is to make it simpler for developers to address issues as early in the application development life cycle as possible while decreasing their cognitive load otherwise required to test applications. Otherwise, the level of testing applied to applications often winds up being insufficient. Today, testing often occurs days—sometimes weeks—after code is initially written, so developers often lose context when test results come back. Developers generally need access to tools that were designed specifically for them versus application testing professionals.
In the case of Testcontainers, a specific requirement has been solved well, which is then integrated into a larger ecosystem of tools designed to increase developer productivity, said Johnston.
It’s not clear how shifting application testing left will impact app testing teams. In theory, those teams should be able to focus more on complex issues as developers themselves run more routine tests. In some cases, however, organizations may decide they no longer need a dedicated testing team as the overall quality of the code improves. One way or another, the number of updates necessary to fix an application should steadily decline over time, even as more complex cloud-native applications are deployed. The challenge, as always, is to make testing a seamless extension to a DevOps workflow.
In the meantime, the amount of rigor applied to testing will only increase as more regulations from a security perspective become increasingly stringent. The potential fines that will likely be levied because cybercriminals later exploited an undiscovered vulnerability will become much stiffer over time. The expectation is that increased testing will be applied to discover and remediate vulnerabilities long before they ever find their way into a production environment.
One way or another, the number of tests run is only going to increase. The issue now is finding a way to create and run those tests in a way that generates the least amount of friction possible.
