How do you minimize the testing costs when testing a cloud application?

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Check out my article on the MoT site, “Testing cloud applications without breaking the bank: Testcontainers and LocalStack,” to gain a clear understanding of how to use TestContainers together with LocalStack to save some costs when testing applications that depend heavily on cloud services.

Even if you have never used or heard about those tools before, the article covers code snippets and other practical examples that you can learn from and gain insights on how to start using those tools to improve your automated tests for your cloud application project.

What You’ll Learn:

  • Learn how to create and run tests for cloud applications using free and open-source tools while reducing the costs of infrastructure and cloud services.
  • Discover some common challenges when testing cloud applications and how to deal with them.
  • Understand how to use real containerized cloud services instead of mocks to make your tests more closely mimic the production environment setup.
  • Gain insights into how those tests can be easily run locally and in your CI/CD, enabling faster feedback;

After reading, share your thoughts:

  • What tools or strategies do you use when testing cloud applications?
  • Do you know what the testing costs for your project are?
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If your team uses Micronaut (Java), I’d recommend exploring Micronaut Test for integration testing. It offers similar functionality to TestContainers—like managing dependencies and spinning up test environments—but with significantly faster startup times. This can be a game-changer for keeping your test suite efficient, especially in CI/CD pipelines where speed matters.*

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Good concept.

But I wonder how well such test tooling simulates/replicates cloud scale/performance related issues. This could be useful if you work out and anticipate cloud issues from latency, misbehaving services, down services, etc. that you can then attempt to simulate/inject.

But it might be hard if you don’t know what you might exactly encounter in production at some given load or scale of deployment. Not sure how you can mimic full production setup in this kind of case.

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Hi @daluu . Good point. I focused more on different functional tests which you can use it, including integration and E2E Tests.

For performance related tests, I would probably not recommend to use those containerized services, because you would not have the same resources available (CPU, memory, network…) in the places that you would run those specific tests, and that would not be reliable enough from my point of view.

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