The nature of doing retail business has changed significantly over the years, thanks to recent technological advancements. With fewer customers in brick-and-mortar stores, online retail systems have been busier and more stressed than ever. Retail statistics project 95% of purchases would be done via eCommerce. Any bad experience with a retail customer, online or mobile devices, can curtail the brand’s life.
Performance, usability, and accessibility are the driving factors for day-to-day business operations. Undetected load and performance issues can traverse the production environment and cause substantial financial losses. As ill-performing applications impact the overall end-users, retailers consider performance testing the most critical step in ensuring that applications are scalable and stable during unprecedented traffic spikes, particularly during the holiday season.
Changing market dynamics have forced businesses to go the agile route. They continue to develop and deploy faster to the market, thus keeping quality at the forefront. The shift-left approach was discovered to find and prevent defects in unit testing. However, results were not limited to unit testing only. They also included other testing types such as performance and integration early in the delivery process. Also, for operational agility, businesses have migrated applications from monolithic architectures to microservices. Microservices architecture provides several advantages such as application reliability, speed of deployment, load balancing, auto-scale up and down, etc.
While architecting microservice-based applications, containers act as enablers. Container adoption has continued to rise over the years to improve developers’ productivity and reduce infrastructure costs. However, managing groups of containers is challenging, and hence container orchestration systems like Kubernetes help organizations scale, schedule, and monitor containers.
Kubernetes manages a high availability of applications and infrastructure and monitors the health of nodes and pods. It has a built-in load balance and can auto-scale up and down as per traffic. However, creating high availability for Kubernetes is not provided by default. Businesses must create these clusters manually and ensure masters, applications, networks, storage, logs and audits are appropriately configured. Any issue in configuration can disrupt service availability.
MOURI Tech, in partnership with Tricentis, provides a comprehensive end-to-end testing tool Neoload for automated performance testing. NeoLoad delivers the capability to interact with container orchestrator Kubernetes, and provides load and stress testing automatically, on-demand. It offers scriptless test automation with an easy point-and-click feature. When a test is run through NeoLoad, the controllers and load generators are spun up for the duration. They shut down once the test is finished, thus avoiding additional costs. The tool provides run-time dashboards for overall test conditions and supports major cloud vendors, popular databases, and operating systems.
Listen to our on-demand webinar where the expert panel featuring speakers from Tricentis and our Intelligent Quality Engineering practice, discuss leading performance testing practices in containerized environments to reduce complex infrastructure costs and overheads.
Simplifying and speeding up critical eCommerce application deployments in containerized environments with high performance can be a winning combination for retail operations.
