Comment by ths | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ths | Hacker News Reader

Related to this topic: When running integration/e2e tests, setting up the environment (all the required services, data stores etc.) in the right sequence, loading them with test data and so forth can be thorny to automate.

Good automation around preparing/provisioning the testing environment is a necessary companion to the testing tools/frameworks themselves.

Most commonly, fully-capable testing environments aren't available during the inner loop of development (where the dev setup can usually only run unit tests or integration tests for 1-2 services + a database).

Because of this, people tend to rely solely on their CI pipelines to run integ/e2e tests, which can slow things down a lot when one of those tests fails (since the write/run/debug loop has to go through the CI pipeline).

As an industry, I think we should start taking automation and developer productivity more seriously—not least when it comes to writing and debugging tests for complex distributed systems. The more we can lower the marginal cost of writing and running tests, the more effective our test suites will become over time.

Shameless plug: My company (https://garden.io/) is developing a framework and toolchain to bring the full capabilities of a CI pipeline to the inner loop of development, so that developers can efficiently run all/any test suites (including integ/e2e tests) in their personal dev environments.

We do this by capturing the full dependency graph (builds, deploys, tests, DB seeding etc.) of the system in a way that can power CI, preview environments and inner-loop development.

The issue isn't tooling, it's hardware resources and in some cases licencing.

While the problem isn't inherently trivial, the issues the tooling can solve is, which is the order of startup and is usually solved with a waitforit startup script, as these services generally talk over network with each other.

The real challenges, like determining seed data etc is too project specific to be abstracted away.

Not to take away from your problem domain, it would be nice to have framework to use so the developers don't have to wire the plumbing for these automations manually anymore - it's just not going to solve the issue that developers will have to wait for the ci pipeline to get their results

> The issue isn't tooling, it's hardware resources and in some cases licencing.

Hardware resources are definitely an issue. That's why we generally recommend using remote development environments, which aren't as resource-constrained as the local dev machine. Making that comparably smooth to the local dev experience (e.g. for live reloading of services without rebuilding containers) needs some clever tooling (which is partly the reason we're building our product).

With production-like remote dev environments, you get the same capabilities as your CI environment, but can run test suites ad-hoc (and without having to spin them up and tearing them down for every test run).

There's no fundamental reason why CI environments should have capabilities that individual dev environments can't have—it's all a matter of automation in the end.

> The real challenges, like determining seed data etc is too project specific to be abstracted away.

Very much agree with that! The generic stuff (dependencies, parallel processing, waiting for things to spin up etc.) should be taken care of by the tooling, but without constraining the project-specific stuff (which is highly individual).

> Hardware resources are definitely an issue. That's why we generally recommend using remote development environments, which aren't as resource-constrained

On the contrary, I almost always advocate for having a rack full of machines in a/the office, running some kind of workload management (kubernetes, vmware/proxmox or a combination of the two).

Hardware is dirty cheap, and plenty fast these days.

If you have an office, chances are you already have a server room anyways (enterprise grade network switches require cooling anyway) you might as well throw a bunch of physical machines in there.

The only real issue I see is that most developers have literally no idea of the runtime resources needed by their code, for a number of reasons (like runtimes hiding that kind of information and the general mindset that pushing out new releases/features is more important than tuning existing ones) so in the cloud developers will just provision bigger and bigger environments. It's all fun and games until two things happens: (A) environment provisionin in the cloud will take long times just like on developer machines andb (B) company earnings will be eroded by cloud infrastructure bills (on-prem infrastructure OTOH provide tax shielding)

I would expand your point to add that another missing key part of dev on big distributed platform is being able to run parts of the system locally. For some shop it is a lot harder than a simple docker-compose (think of envs with 10 or 100 of micro-services), any laptop cannot handle such load and it is critical for devs to work on the machine, otherwise you lose a lot of time with shared dev envs, SSH tunnels or rsync... I agree that CI pipelines are a pain in a distributed system but I heard more complains from devs not being able to test locally some new feature in serviceA that depends on 10 other services + DBs to work.

Running locally is great but I would already be happy if I could step through a CICD pipeline with a debugger. This includes stepping though the services the pipeline calls. Also include breakpoints.

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