Speedscale for SUSE Rancher: accelerate cloud native application testing

SUSE GUEST BLOG ARTICLE AUTHORED BY:

Ken Ahrens, CEO and Founder, Speedscale

Speedscale for SUSE Rancher helps you modernize the way you develop, test and deploy your cloud native application landscape so you can accelerate your application development life cycle and gain confidence in your software releases. ~ Terry

Continuous Kubernetes testing with traffic replay

Running Kubernetes at scale is really hard. Developing microservices apps that run well in a Kubernetes environment takes complexity to the next level. SUSE Rancher makes Kubernetes easier to use with a point and click web interface that simplifies the process of scaling out and managing workloads across all of your clusters – from core to cloud to edge. Combining Speedscale with SUSE Rancher gives development teams visibility into microservices to help them improve service performance and quality. By implementing traffic replay as part of continuous integration, development teams can release with confidence. 

Traditional approaches to software testing are not keeping up with the trend of “continuous everything.”  According to a recent GitLab survey of developers, testing was the slowest phase of application development. This causes a gap where code is ready to be delivered to production, but teams must slow these releases with canary deployments and feature flags to ensure new changes don’t break production. 

Testing in production is a great capability, but not applicable for every release. Teams must maximize the benefits of the quality feedback from production without negatively impacting users.

Pros of testing in production:

• Testing is based on real user patterns, so teams don’t have to “guess” how the app will behave in production.
• It delivers high quality signals from the production environment, like the SRE golden signals of latency, throughput, error rate, etc.
• It reduces the need to stand up large non-production environments for testing.

Cons of treating users as test subjects:

• Code bugs can impact user experience, or in some cases cause a cascading outage.
• Rolling back a change might corrupt data in downstream systems that will also need to be rolled back.
• Large scale testing in production often must be limited to a small number of variations, due to the significant effort to manage and retire feature flags.

Continuous testing within the CI/CD pipeline enables “shifting left,” which lets teams understand the quality of new code before it impacts customers. The combination of SUSE Rancher and Speedscale lets teams use a GitOps workflow to validate new code before it ever reaches the production environment. 

Speedscale provides traffic replay capabilities that help developers discover API performance and contract issues earlier in their release cycle. Users can collect, sanitize and replay API traffic, simulate load or chaos, and measure latency, throughput, saturation and errors before the code is released. 

The Speedscale Operator is easily installed from the SUSE Rancher Apps & Marketplace. 

Use the operator to deploy the Speedscale control plane to any workload in your SUSE Rancher landscape to capture traffic into and out of the microservices.  Then, use this data to run an isolation test environment for your application.  These traffic replays can be easily created for each microservice workload in the cluster, enabling robust testing across numerous scenarios.

Use Speedscale’s traffic viewer to understand all the inbound and outbound calls for a given microservice. This helps you see how an API is actually called and automatically discovers all back-end dependencies.

Drill down even further to get the full-fidelity details for a particular transaction including the headers, payload and complete request and response. This kind of data is tremendously valuable to debug exactly how a specific call is being made.

After creating a snapshot from the specific data desired, you can easily replay it in another cluster in your SUSE Rancher landscape.  The result of the replay is a report that helps you understand how each microservice behaves under realistic load conditions. View the testing results report to identify and isolate latency, throughput, memory and other issues.

Speedscale for SUSE Rancher provides you with the tools you need to rapidly stress test your cloud native applications with real-world scenarios, gain confidence in your application releases and accelerate innovation.

Missed our SUSE One Partner Solutions Showcase, “Accelerate and simplify cloud native application testing in your SUSE Rancher landscape with Speedscale”?  Catch it on-demand.

Additional resources 

• Speedscale Traffic Replay technical datasheet
• Speedscale Sandbox – explore Speedscale with pre-loaded traffic
• Speedscale Free Trial – get started today
• Get started with SUSE Rancher in 2 easy steps

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