⚪ ️5.3 Perform e2e testing over a true production-mirror
:white_check_mark: Do: End to end (e2e) testing are the main challenge of every CI pipeline — creating an identical ephemeral production mirror on the fly with all the related cloud services can be tedious and expensive. Finding the best compromise is your game: Docker-compose allows crafting isolated dockerized environment with identical containers using a single plain text file but the backing technology (e.g. networking, deployment model) is different from real-world productions. You may combine it with ‘AWS Local’ to work with a stub of the real AWS services. If you went serverless multiple frameworks like serverless and AWS SAM allows the local invocation of FaaS code.
The huge Kubernetes ecosystem is yet to formalize a standard convenient tool for local and CI-mirroring though many new tools are launched frequently. One approach is running a ‘minimized-Kubernetes’ using tools like Minikube and MicroK8s which resemble the real thing only come with less overhead. Another approach is testing over a remote ‘real-Kubernetes’, some CI providers (e.g. Codefresh) has native integration with Kubernetes environment and make it easy to run the CI pipeline over the real thing, others allow custom scripting against a remote Kubernetes.
❌ Otherwise: Using different technologies for production and testing demands maintaining two deployment models and keeps the developers and the ops team separated
✏ Code Examples
:clap: Example: a CI pipeline that generates Kubernetes cluster on the fly (Credit: Dynamic-environments Kubernetes)
deploy:
stage: deploy
image: registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-examples/kubernetes-deploy
script:
- ./configureCluster.sh $KUBE_CA_PEM_FILE $KUBE_URL $KUBE_TOKEN
- kubectl create ns $NAMESPACE
- kubectl create secret -n $NAMESPACE docker-registry gitlab-registry --docker-server="$CI_REGISTRY" --docker-username="$CI_REGISTRY_USER" --docker-password="$CI_REGISTRY_PASSWORD" --docker-email="$GITLAB_USER_EMAIL"
- mkdir .generated
- echo "$CI_BUILD_REF_NAME-$CI_BUILD_REF"
- sed -e "s/TAG/$CI_BUILD_REF_NAME-$CI_BUILD_REF/g" templates/deals.yaml | tee ".generated/deals.yaml"
- kubectl apply --namespace $NAMESPACE -f .generated/deals.yaml
- kubectl apply --namespace $NAMESPACE -f templates/my-sock-shop.yaml
environment:
name: test-for-ci