How do you test an application that relies heavily on cloud services? Do you have a specific strategy for testing it, or do you simply run your tests regardless of the infrastructure costs?Nowadays, many applications rely on different cloud services, such as databases, message queues, and file storage offered by cloud providers. Those cloud services bring considerable infrastructure costs and complexity in terms of testing cloud applications. The challenges include teams relying on mocks to test the application locally and in CI/CD, as well as extra costs to create test environments that use real services. However, a good alternative to deal with that is to use emulation tools to simulate those cloud services, providing good confidence and saving a lot of costs.In this talk, we’ll explore how Testcontainers and LocalStack offer an affordable and scalable solution to cloud application testing without compromising on quality. This session will demonstrate (including a live showcase) how to use Testcontainers in combination with LocalStack to spin up containerized services to emulate all the AWS cloud services that your application depends on, enabling you to have your own cloud running locally on your machine or CI/CD. Together, those two tools can provide an efficient, cost-saving alternative to traditional cloud testing strategies.Here is the agenda that I plan for this talk:State of cloud applications nowadaysWhat are the challenges when testing cloud applications?Which options do we have to avoid some of those costs?Introduction to Localstack and TestcontainersLocalstack and TestContainers in actionConclusionBy the end of this session, you will have actionable insights on how to optimize your testing process, lower your infrastructure costs, and ensure your cloud applications are ready for production without complex setups.
Key takeaways:- Learn how to create and run tests for cloud applications using free and open-source tools while reducing the costs of infrastructure and cloud services.
- Discover some common challenges when testing cloud applications and how to deal with them.
- Understand how to use real containerized cloud services instead of mocks to make your tests more closely mimic the production environment setup.
