Isaac Mosquera, CTO & co-founder at Armory.io sat down to talk testing mircorservices in production with The New Stack San Francisco Correspondent TC Currie as part of The New Stack’s series on Microservices.  

Within Armory platform platform is a product called Canary which is one tool to help test microservices in production.  The name comes from the traditional  miners’ practice of taking a canary with them into coal mines.  When mined, coal can release an odorless toxic gas that would kill miners where they stood.  The canary became an early warning system.  If the canary died, the miners booked it out of there.  

Similarly, Canary, launches a small bit of code into production to see how it effects the system as a whole, and discover is this element introducing a lot more risk into the production environment. “That’s a lot cheaper way to do it than set up manual QA testing to assess the risk,” Mosquera said.