What is performance testing? What do we measure with performance testing? How should we define performance tests? How and where should we run performance tests? Is it enough to run performance tests? Should we do performance testing?
Examples are provided through Ddosify.
Continue readingLocalStack is a fully functional mock of AWS services running locally on your computer. We can use it to develop and test cloud and serverless apps offline. It can run through the CLI, in a Docker container, or in a Kubernetes cluster. We can use it to create mocks of S3 buckets, Lambda functions, RDS databases, ECR repositories, and more.
Continue readingThe video below is a clip from the "Canary Deployments To Kubernetes Using Istio and Friends" course in Udemy. It provides the introduction to the course we released in December 2019. Additional preview clips are available inside the course. Please use the coupons with discounts provided below.
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Welcome to practical guide to canary deployments. Unlike some other work that I did…tutorials, workshops, and so on and so forth, that were very focused on a single tool, this time I will focus more on a process.
We’re going to try to figure out how to do canary deployments inside of Kubernetes. Because Kubernetes is everywhere now, I will assume that you are using Kubernetes. But outside of that, we are going to try to figure out which tools to use, but all serving as the process itself, not for the sake of learning a specific tool. And during that process, we are going to decide which tools to use and why to use them and the end result will be a fully operational canary deployments process that you will be able to plug into any CI/CD tool or any tool that orchestrates the lifecycle of your application.
So we will definitely choose some tools that we will use in a process.
And those tools will be revolving around Istio. I will explain why Istio a bit later.
So we will use Kubernetes and Istio for canary deployments, but the end result will be agnostic to the tool that will orchestrate your processes. We will most likely also have to choose one or two additional tools. Which tools we’ll choose is yet to be discovered.
For now just think of this as being a practical guide to a specific process. And that process today is canary deployments in Kubernetes.
Test-Driven Development is a process that relies on the repetition of very short development cycle. It is based on the test-first concept of Extreme Programming (XP) that encourages simple design with high level of confidence.
The procedure of doing TDD is following:
In this article we’ll go through the exercise of writing a method that will write string content to the specified file. There will be an option to specify whether we should overwrite an existing file. In addition, directories should be created if they do not already exist.
Programming language is Scala and testing framework that will be used is Specs2. In the spirit of unit testing, instead of interactions with the file system we’ll use mocks with Mockito (already included in Specs2). All the code will be done using Test-Driven Development (TDD).
This article is based on an existing code done for the open source application BDD Assistant located in the TechnologyConversationsBdd repository.
Let’s get started.
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This article is part of the Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment series.
Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is a process or it can be a tool. In many cases, BDD is both. However, it should not be a goal in itself. The goal of software development is to deliver quality as fast and as cheap as possible. The only real measure of quality is whether it fulfills user needs in a reliable manner. The best way we can take to accomplish that goal is through continuous integration, deployment and delivery. For the sake of this article I will ignore the differences between those three and refer to all of them as continuous integration or CI.
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Documentation needs to be comprehensive, always up-to-date and accessible. By comprehensive I mean that it must cover all important areas of the code as well as all functions of the application. While importance of documentation is obvious to most, many struggle without success to have it accurate and up-to-date. Response to “poor” documentation is often assignment of more resources and more time. More often than not, documentation is created for wrong reasons.
A typical waterfall project has well defined phases that go from the idea conception until putting the solution in production, being the most typical of them:
It’s very common in big companies that there’s a functional team responsible for each phase. Thus, we get:
However, one of the big problems from this approach is that usually these teams work in silos. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing and this causes inefficiencies. To make it worse, sometimes the way to try to reduce silos is through an immense increase in bureaucracy, forcing teams to communicate through documentation.
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DISCLAIMER: This is not a tutorial on how to learn Python, in fact, I have never used Python before so don’t take me as example. What I want to share with you is how to learn a new language, strenghen the TDD principles and practice a Kata in an easy way.
Last week I attended the Global day of Code retreat in Barcelona. It was a wonderful experience that generated me a lot of energy to code again (I became a manager some time ago and I don’t code as often as I’d like to). That day we used the Conway’s Game of Life which I recommend to practice the TDD approach.
After investigating about several other katas I stumbled upon the Cyber dojo online tool. Basically this is a web page in which you can practice any kata and choose among more than 20 languages you want to learn without the need to do any setup at all. In other words, if you want to grasp the basics for a new language, this is the perfect place.
Also, one of the nice features from Cyber dojo is that after you’re done with all the coding you wanted to do, you can download all your changes into a zipped Git file and then you have the repository with all the changes that you worked on.
In the previous article Test Driven Development (TDD): Example Walkthrough an example of TDD was given. It went from writing first test and its implementation to having a set of requirements fully tested and developed. Now it’s time to learn what the best TDD practices are. This article will be built on examples from the previous one.
Best practices are solutions to a set of problems under certain situations. Not following them would make us “reinvent the wheel” and struggle with the same problems already solved by others. On the other hand, best practices should not be followed blindly. They should be tried out. With an informed decision at hand, they can be adopted as they are, modified to serve better specific situation or fully discarded.
Some of the best practices described here are inherited from other sets of practices and used when doing TDD. For example, most (if not all) unit testing practices should be used when doing TDD.
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Technology Conversations 