Drive Out Through Testing
Explore testing methods to handle failures and blockages in distributed systems. Understand the limitations of QA testing, capacity imbalances, and unpredictable workloads. Learn to simulate real-world conditions using test harnesses, stress test system components, and apply strategies like autoscaling to build resilient software that recovers gracefully from failures.
QA Testing limitations
Unbalanced capacities are another problem rarely observed during QA. The main reason is that QA for every system is usually scaled down to just two servers. So during integration testing, two servers represent the front-end system and two servers represent the back-end system, resulting in a one-to-one ratio. In production, where the big budget is allocated, the ratio could be ten to one or worse. Should we make QA an exact scale replica of the entire enterprise? It would be nice, wouldn’t it? Of course, we can’t do that. We can apply a test harness, though (see Test Harnesses). By mimicking a back-end system wilting under load, the test harness helps you verify that your front-end system degrades gracefully (see ...