Introducing the Kratix Promise Testing Framework: Speed and Confidence for Building Your Platform

Testing is an essential part of software development: it allows engineering teams to iterate quickly and with confidence, enabling safe refactorings and new features to be delivered without breaking existing contracts or customers’ expectations. This is a given for application development, but what about when teams are building platform capabilities and services? 

We have found that Kratix Promise development is no different than regular application development, and our new Promise Testing Framework ensures that Platform Engineers can have the same guarantees.

The Syntasso team observed this first-hand by building Promises alongside our customers, collecting several best practices for Promise testing along the way. We want to make sure you benefit from these learnings, which inspired us to codify them into the Promise Testing Framework.

Available now for Syntasso Kratix Enterprise (SKE) users, this framework is a tool designed to make it easier and faster to test your Promises, helping you to:

• Speed up development, with fast feedback loops for your Promise testing runs,

• Spend less time, effort, and resources by removing the need for a complete Kubernetes environment to test Promises.

• Reduce risk by automatically validating that your Promise allocates Resources to the correct Destinations and generates the expected outputs.

The Promise Testing Framework enables you to focus on developing your Promise code, while we handle testing to ensure it works as expected. Check out the Promise Testing Framework docs!

Why we created the Promise Testing Framework

Although customers told us that “Promise writing is not so scary once you get your head around Kubernetes”, we recognised that writing a Promise could still feel intimidating at first. 

We found that the need for a live Kubernetes cluster and manual deployment resulted in a slow feedback loop for Platform Engineers. We also saw engineers writing their own frameworks and libraries to verify whether their Promises generated the correct outputs and scheduled Resources correctly, thereby spending valuable time reinventing the wheel instead of building new Promises. 

We want Platform Engineers to move faster and invest their time in writing and improving their Promises to deliver delightful experiences to their own customers. This is precisely where the Promise Testing Framework, part of SKE, comes to accelerate the process.

Complementing the Kratix SDK, the Promise Testing Framework eliminates the need for Platform Engineers to track Kratix-specific constructs, verifying that the Promise structure is correct and that all outputs align with expectations. It also provides engineers with an environment outside of Kubernetes to test their Promises, all through a CLI ready for use in Continuous Integration (CI) processes.

Key features of the Promise Testing Framework

If you ask for help via the Kratix CLI, this is what you will find:

🚀 Test without access to a K8s cluster: you can now test whether your Promise generates the desired outputs and metadata without the need for a live Kubernetes system, significantly shortening the feedback loop for testing a Promise.

🔎 End-to-end tests: test the end-to-end lifecycle of your Promise, from the Docker image build all the way to the outputs being generated by your Workflows, covering all the required steps.

📖 No more manual YAML checking: with the drop of a file, you can now check whether your Workflows create what you want without the need to check YAML files manually.

🛞 Fine-grained test chaining: you are in control; you can test your entire Workflow Pipeline with a single run or test them individually, stage by stage. This allows Platform Engineers to focus on Promise development and ensure their code delivers what is expected from their Promise.

🔧 CI integration: as a command-line tool, you can easily integrate the Kratix Testing Framework into your infrastructure CI workflows, allowing you to deliver a Promise just like you deliver software.

Want to try it out? 

The Promise Testing Framework is delivered as a set of plugins for the Kratix CLI. If you are an SKE customer, please contact your account manager or reach out to the team at hello@kratix.io to obtain a token. Then, follow the installation instructions to download a bundle of the Kratix CLI, along with the Kratix Testing Framework plugins.

To understand which options are available for your tests, please check our documentation or run kratix test help. To learn how to build your own tests, see Testing your Promise with the Testing Framework section in our documentation.

If you are new to Kratix or still considering SKE, visit syntasso.io, request a trial token, and we’ll be in touch to help you get started. We’d love to hear how you are using Kratix’s new capabilities to improve software delivery in your teams.