Insight Partners has a rich history of investing in developer testing tools. We’re proud to have supported companies like SmartBear, Tricentis/QASymphony, Browserstack, Waldo, and others which help their customers accelerate release cycles and deliver better, more stable end products.
An emergent technique within testing we have closely monitored is integration testing – the testing of interdependent code and resources to ensure components operate as expected. As developers shift toward microservices, testing the interconnection of application components is becoming ubiquitous and an integral part of the development process.
Testcontainers has widely become the leading open-source software for integration tests, with ~7 million monthly Docker downloads and a vibrant and passionate developer community. The community’s growth is accelerating. Using Testcontainers, developers can spin up testing environments for common integration and UI tests using Docker containers, which act as “throwaway” instances for production-like replicas of external resources (e.g., databases, web browsers, other microservices). This enables faster creation and execution of integration tests and mitigates many painful issues for developers that come from spinning up and taking down tests manually.
There are lots of obstacles to using integration testing, particularly for more complex software. Keeping local testing environments up-to-date with new code releases is cumbersome. Running integration tests is taxing on local developer machines. Replicating tests from one machine to another is not as simple as it seems. Many developers we’ve spoken to have had some form of the “works only on my machine” problem where a test is successful on their laptop but not a teammate’s!
The Testcontainers’ founders set out to build a cloud-hosted, commercial version – driven by the simple belief that running Testcontainers in the cloud would provide clear improvements to development velocity and better enterprise deployments.
For this they are now launching Testcontainers Cloud (TCC). Through this new product, developers can seamlessly route integration tests to cloud servers and fine-tune their test environments to production-grade specifications, resolving the “works on my machine” problem. By sending tests to the cloud, developers also free up local compute resources and enable tests to run up to 3x faster. Developers do not even need Docker installed on their machine and can now take advantage of Cloud IDEs and other live collaboration tools.
With the launch of Testcontainers Cloud to public beta, AtomicJar offers a full suite of integration testing products. AtomicJar streamlines integration testing for software projects, regardless of scope or complexity.
Before making our investment, we conducted extensive diligence that included surveying hundreds of developers, talking to many of AtomicJar’s beta customers, and deeply understanding the product and its roadmap and were excited by the size of the opportunity that will continue to grow as microservices continue to get adopted by companies of all sizes. We are thrilled about AtomicJar’s potential to improve the productivity of the almost 90M software developers across a wide range of industries, geographies, and software development methodologies. We’re excited to partner with them as they help lead the “shift left” of best-in-class software testing and delivery.
