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by tracker1 2660 days ago
There are different types of testing.

    * Manual Testing
    * Automated Unit Testing
    * Black Box Testing
    * Smoke Testing
    * Functional Systems Testing
With varying layers of complexity... I would say that Unit and Black box testing can be much easier with microservices. Orchestrating smoke tests or functional systems tests is a bit harder.

It also can vary by application design and what tooling you have in place.
2 comments
philwelch 2660 days ago
It’s not a question of which types of testing are easier, it’s a question of which types of testing are necessary to guarantee the same level of coverage. If you’re testing functionality that crosses a service boundary, you need to do integration testing. If you’re testing functionality that exists within a single service, you can settle for unit tests.

In a monolithic architecture where your only service boundaries are frontend-to-backend and backend-to-datastore, you still need some integration testing but not a ton. If your backend is comprised of a network of microservices, you need to integration test all of those points and, most likely, all of the data access layers that each microservice has.

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mikekchar 2660 days ago
I'm not quite use how unit testing can be easier. Instead of stubbing a function call, you have to stub a TCP/IP request. If you think of a "microservice" as a library that runs in a different process and whose dispatch mechanism is via TCP/IP, you can pretty easily see that testing a library is easier. It's even more easy if your library is compiled with a language whose types are statically checked because you can guarantee that the library functions match the types of the calls without having to jump through hoops like gRPC.
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tracker1 2660 days ago
If the TCP/IP call and mechanisms are abstracted out into other modules for FaaS, then you only need to test your single, isolated function, what it touches and returns. You don't even need to test the entire platform.

Structurally you can still use a mono-repo for all your deployed functions so that they can eve share some test functionality.

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