Cloud Knowledge for Testers
1.The application is hosted in the cloud, and the tester is responsible for deploying and testing it in different environments. Before commencing testing, a tester should know which environment (Example: EC2 instance in AWS) to connect to and deploy the changes to. It can save a lot of time if we know how to access virtual compute services, and how to debug and troubleshoot if anything goes wrong.
For example: suppose that we have deployed the application successfully, but application is not launched properly. Next step will be to troubleshoot what went wrong? Which part of the application has the issue? Is frontend having problem or backend or database? Prior cloud knowledge can help us to perform debugging effectively.
2. In the cloud, applications can take advantage of different related services, such as messaging services, database services, streaming services etc.
For example, knowing how to connect to a queue in cloud (example SQS service in AWS) and performing basic operation like checking received messages and sending/receiving messages can be very handy while testing the application. In a similar way, if we know how to connect to a DB in cloud along with basic security settings (inbound/outbound IM group policies) can be helpful to speed up the testing process.
3.Setting up test automation infra in cloud can be another use case here. There are many ways to achieve this, and different clouds provide different services for the same. For example, we can perform server less UI test execution using selenium, AWS Lambda, AWS Faregate and AWS developers tools. AWS device farm can be used cross browser or cross device test execution in the cloud.
4.Monitoring is must for every cloud application, so knowledge of cloud-based monitoring tools like Splunk, New Relic, Datadog etc. should also be part of testers skillset. While testing the application level errors/exceptions/alerts this is very useful. Another use case could be getting actual product usage patterns from those tools to create risk based testing strategy.
5.We may also observe issues related to performance and security of the application hosted in cloud. Having knowledge about the cloud infra layer configurations, permissions, security groups etc. can help to trouble shoot those areas.
