TESTING IN THE SERVERLESS ERA: NAVIGATING THE CHALLENGES OF MODERN CLOUD ARCHITECTURE
Keywords:
Cloud Architecture, CI/CD Integration, Serverless Computing, Quality Assurance Testing, Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)Abstract
This comprehensive article examines the evolving landscape of serverless computing, particularly focusing on testing challenges and quality assurance strategies. The article explores how the serverless paradigm transforms cloud computing while presenting unique testing challenges for Software Development Engineers in Test (SDETs). Through analysis of multiple studies and real-world implementations, this article investigates key areas, including dynamic environment management, event-driven complexity, asynchronous operations, and CI/CD integration. The article reveals critical metrics across various platforms, showing that serverless architectures offer significant cost reduction and operational efficiency benefits. However, they also introduce complex testing scenarios with considerable cold start variations across different runtimes. It presents empirical data on function execution success rates, resource utilization patterns, and recovery metrics, providing a framework for understanding and addressing the unique quality assurance requirements in serverless environments. The findings demonstrate that organizations must adapt their testing strategies to address environment consistency, event handling, and performance optimization challenges while leveraging the benefits of automated scaling and resource management. This article contributes to the growing knowledge of serverless computing by offering practical insights and methodologies for implementing effective testing strategies in modern cloud architectures.
References
Markets and Markets, "Serverless Computing Market by Service Model (Function as a Service, Backend as a Service), Compute (Functions, Containers), Database (Relational, Non-relational), Storage, Application Integration, Monitoring & Security - Global Forecast to 2029," MarketsandMarkets Research, 2024. Available: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/serverless-computing-market-217021547.html
Zijun Li, Linsong Guo, Jiagan Cheng, Quan Chen, Bingsheng He, and Minyi Guo, "The Serverless Computing Survey: A Technical Primer for Design Architecture ," arXiv:2112.12921 [cs.DC], Jan. 2022. Available: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.12921
Eric Jonas, Johann Schleier-Smith, Vikram Sreekanti, Chia-Che Tsai, Anurag Khandelwal, Qifan Pu, Vaishaal Shankar, Joao Carreira, Karl Krauth, Neeraja Yadwadkar, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Raluca Ada Popa, Ion Stoica, David A. Patterson, "Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing," University of California at Berkeley Tech Report No. UCB/EECS-2019-3, Feb. 2019. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03383
Paul Castro, Vatche Ishakian, Vinod Muthusamy, Aleksander Slominski, "The Rise of Serverless Computing," Communications of the ACM, vol. 62, no. 12, pp. 44-54, Dec. 2019. Available: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368454
Simon Eismann; Joel Scheuner; Erwin van Eyk; Maximilian Schwinger; Johannes Grohmann; Nikolas Herbst, "Serverless Applications: Why, When, and How? Results of a Systematic Literature Review," ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 54, no. 6, pp. 1-35, July 2021. Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9190031
Ioana Baldini, Paul Castro, Kerry Chang, Perry Cheng, Stephen Fink, Vatche Ishakian, Nick Mitchell, Vinod Muthusamy, Rodric Rabbah, Aleksander Slominski, Philippe Suter, "Serverless Computing: Current Trends and Open Problems," in Research Advances in Cloud Computing, S. Chaudhary, G. Somani, and R. Buyya, Eds., Singapore: Springer, 2021, pp. 1-20. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03178
Hossein Shafiei, Ahmad Khonsari, Payam Mousavi, "Serverless Computing: A Survey of Opportunities, Challenges and Applications," in Networking and Internet Architecture, Nov. 2019. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01296
Hyungro Lee, Kumar Satyam, Geoffrey Fox, "Evaluation of Production Serverless Computing Environments," in IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, CLOUD, July, 2018. Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8457830
Zahra Shojaee Rad & Mostafa Ghobaei-Arani, "Data pipeline approaches in serverless computing: a taxonomy, review, and research trends," Journal of Big Data, vol. 11, Article 39, 2024. Available: https://journalofbigdata.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40537-024-00939-0
N. Forsgren et al., "Accelerate State of DevOps 2021," Google Cloud & DORA, 2021. Available: https://dora.dev/research/2021/dora-report/2021-dora-accelerate-state-of-devops-report.pdf
Zijun Li, Linsong Guo, Jiagan Cheng, Quan Chen, Bingsheng He, Minyi Guo, "The Serverless Computing Survey: A Technical Primer for Design Architecture," in ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), Volume 54, Issue 10s, Sept. 2022, pp. 1-34. Available: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3508360
Joel Scheuner, Philipp Leitner, "Function-as-a-Service Performance Evaluation: A Multivocal Literature Review," in Performance (cs.PF); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC), 2020. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.03276
Hassan B. Hassan, Saman A. Barakat & Qusay I. Sarhan, "Survey on serverless computing," Journal of Cloud Computing, vol. 10, 2021. Available: https://journalofcloudcomputing.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13677-021-00253-7
Mohammad S. Aslanpour, Sukhpal Singh Gill, Adel N. Toosi, "Performance evaluation metrics for cloud, fog and edge computing: A review, taxonomy, benchmarks and standards for future research," Internet of Things, Volume 12, December 2020, 100273. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2542660520301062
