Conquering the Testing Challenges of Serverless Applications

[video:https://youtu.be/DxCAwJM8Wgc width:300 height:200 align:right]

Serverless cloud applications are rapidly moving into the mainstream. In this model, teams focus on developing and deploying code on a known technology stack and runtime, with fixed interfaces for application, database, and network, and they offer the advantages of lower costs, faster development, and elastic growth. But testing serverless applications brings significant challenges to testers. Because the stack is typically maintained by the cloud provider, it is updated with new versions and security patches on a regular basis. Testers have to continuously test the stack interfaces to make sure that interface integrity is maintained. Further, the serverless model usually incorporates an execution runtime engine, abstracting the running code from the rest of the platform. The database can also be abstracted away from actual data calls, which can hide important information during traditional testing. Peter Varhol and Gerie Owen will explain the architectures of serverless systems and applications and look at the challenges they pose for testers, why those challenges exist, and how testers can overcome them. You'll learn a model for testing serverless components and entire applications within the context of a serverless runtime.