Improving the Developer Experience with Testcontainers and OpenShift

Reducing developers' cognitive load is key to increasing their productivity. Even still, 76% of organizations say cognitive load on developers is so high that it is a source of low productivity. In response, organizations are establishing platform engineering teams to improve the developer experience while ensuring governance, security and control, with Gartner anticipating 80% of companies forming these groups by 2026. 

Developers' quest for shorter-feedback cycles drives the adoption of solutions that allow them to get a fast feedback cycle, in the inner loop of development, often even before they commit. As early as 2019 Red Hat partnered with the Testcontainers team and adopted the pattern in Quarkus, releasing Quarkus Dev-Services, a first of its kind local-development and testing cloud native experience in Java.

Yet local, developer-hosted solutions rely on developers installing and managing their Docker environment with Podman Desktop, Docker Desktop, or alternatives and often fall outside the control of governance of an individual or platform team.

Red Hat and the Testcontainers team at Docker have partnered to provide the full power of Testcontainers in OpenShift while still taking full advantage of corporate governance, security and compliance, and the overall flexibility of the platform.

OpenShift customers can now deploy the Testcontainers Cloud back-end to OpenShift. As a result of this collaboration - developers will be able to iterate locally and benefit from the workload running in a secure way on OpenShift clusters.

Testcontainers Cloud

Testcontainers Cloud allows the at-scale adoption and productization of Testcontainers by platform teams as it acts as a managed service providing a cloud back-end for Testcontainers tests that run locally or in Continuous Integration (CI). By allowing organizations to manage Testcontatiners adoption and roll-out, it reduces local resource requirements and provides a consistent scalable back-end for all users of Testcontainers in an organization.Testcontainers Cloud also adds centralized management dashboards and improves debugging of Testcontainers-powered dependencies and other developer-specific functionality.

By deploying Testcontainers Cloud back-end to OpenShift all the benefits of Testcontainers are provided while the data and workload stay within the OpenShift environment.

Interested in learning more about Testcontainers and OpenShift? Reach out or stop by the Docker (J3) and Red Hat (E1) booths at KubeCon EU 2024!

For more hands-on experience and detail:

• You can get started with Red Hat OpenShift

• You can try out Testcontainers

• Find out about Quarkus Dev Services

• And sign up for Testcontainers Cloud