- Posted in: Admin-tips, Development, Networks
This article has been originally posted on Swiftype Engineering blog.
For any modern technology company, a comprehensive application test suite is an absolute necessity. Automated testing suites allow developers to move faster while avoiding any loss of code quality or system stability. Software development has seen great benefit come from the adoption of automated testing frameworks and methodologies, however, the culture of automated testing has neglected one key area of modern web application serving stack: web application edge routing and multiplexing rulesets.
From modern load balancer appliances that allow for TCL based rule sets; local or remotely hosted varnish VCL rules; or in the power and flexibility that Nginx and OpenResty make available through LUA, edge routing rulesets have become a vital part of application serving controls.
Over the past decade or so, it has become possible to incorporate more and more logic into edge web server infrastructures. Almost every modern web server has support for scripting, enabling developers to make their edge servers smarter than ever before. Unfortunately, the application logic configured within web servers is often much harder to test than that hosted directly in application code, and thus too often software teams resort to manual testing, or worse, customers as testers, by shipping their changes to production without edge routing testing having been performed.
In this post, I would like to explain the approach Swiftype has taken to ensure that our test suites account for our use of complex edge web server logic
to manage our production traffic flow, and thus that we can confidently deploy changes to our application infrastructure with little or no risk.