Bunk8s: Enabling Easy Integration Testing of Microservices in Kubernetes

Abstract

Microservice architecture is the common choice for cloud applications these days since each individual microservice can be independently modified, replaced, and scaled. However, the complexity of microservice applications requires automated testing with a focus on the interactions between the services. While this is achievable with end-to-end tests, they are error-prone, brittle, expensive to write, time-consuming to run, and require the entire application to be deployed. Integration tests are an alternative to end-to-end tests since they have a smaller test scope and require the deployment of a significantly fewer number of services. The de-facto standard for deploying microservice applications in the cloud is containers with Kubernetes being the most widely used container orchestration platform. To support the integration testing of microservices in Kubernetes, several tools such as Octopus, Istio, and Jenkins exist. However, each of these tools either lack crucial functionality or lead to a substantial increase in the complexity and growth of the tool landscape when introduced into a project. To this end, we present Bunk8s, a tool for integration testing of microservice applications in Kubernetes that overcomes the limitations of these existing tools. Bunk8s is independent of the test framework used for writing integration tests, independent of the used CI/CD infrastructure, and supports test result publishing. A video demonstrating the functioning of our tool is available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8wbS25O4Bo.