Microservices have had a huge impact on the software industry in recent years. Scalability, flexibility, and portability are very often named as benefits of this architectural style. Furthermore, microservices are an enabler for emerging software development practices, especially DevOps and continuous deployment (CD), which aim for more frequent and rapid deployments from development into production.
Even though performance is an inherent necessity to achieve scalability and elasticity, performance engineering for microservices has so far only achieved very little attention by both the micro services and the performance engineering research communities. An extensive body of approaches and best practices are available for Microservice Testing for Functional, Automation, Performance & Service Virtualization etc.
What are Microservices
Microservices – also known as the microservice architecture – is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of services that are
- Highly maintainable and testable
- Loosely coupled
- Independently deployable
- Organized around business capabilities
- Owned by a small team
The microservice architecture enables the rapid, frequent, and reliable delivery of large, complex applications. It also enables an organization to evolve its technology stack.
Microservices against Traditional Model
The main difference we observe in the below diagram is that all the features initially were under a single instance sharing a single database. But then, with microservices, each feature was allotted a different microservice, handling their own data, and performing different functionalities.
This denotes the flexibility of microservices, easy to identify the issues & resolve them immediately, since each Service are mapped as individual element on microservice architecture.
Microservices Testing Approach
Microservices architecture divides the complex application into smaller modules. This provides a number of benefits over the monolithic architecture. Microservices architecture deploys independently of the other modules. Microservices take this approach to independent services. With microservices, we will easily be able to adopt technology more quickly and understand how new advancements may help us.
In short, the Microservices architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API.
Micro services are particularly well-suited to entities that are accessed with the create, retrieve, update, delete (CRUD) pattern.
CRUD Operation works on single entity.
When working with such entities, you typically use only one entity at a time, such as a user, and you typically perform only one of the CRUD actions at a time
Therefore, you only need a single microservice call for the operation.
- Look for entities that have CRUD operations plus a set of business methods that could be utilized in many parts of your application.
- Identify the language, platform & technology followed by the services.
- Define the tool set for the doing various forms of testing (Functional, Automation, Performance & Security)
Different Types of Microservices Testing
