Testing in Production with Kubernetes

Cloud-native applications built with microservices require new testing strategies due to the interactions between services. Traditional isolation testing is insufficient for these architectures. End-to-end testing in replicated environments can improve service quality but is expensive and challenging to maintain. Kubernetes allows running multiple versions of containerized services, enabling testing-in-production strategies like blue-green deployment, traffic shadowing, canary deployment, A/B testing, and feature flags. These methods reduce the risk associated with new releases by allowing teams to test changes on a subset of users before rolling them out more broadly. Feature flags decouple service deployment from feature enablement, enabling frequent merging and releasing without broken parts. However, managing multiple feature flags can become complex as applications scale.