Testing Local and Staging Environments
Overview
In the context of testing within a CI/CD pipeline, also known as shift-left testing, the production environment is typically the last link in the chain. Your application is likely to go through several steps before reaching this stage.
While scheduled Synthetic tests focus primarily on publicly available production environments, Continuous Testing allows you to test your application in any or all environments it’s deployed in throughout the development cycle.
Testing in multiple environments
Continuous Testing can reuse the same scenario from scheduled tests used against the production environment to test publicly available pre-production environments.
Whether it’s for a blue—green deployment, or a dedicated staging environment, Continuous Testing allows you to reroute an existing scenario to a different environment. For more information, see Testing Multiple Environments.
Testing while using proxies, firewalls, or VPNs
Continuous Testing can test your application in the early steps of the development cycle, including behind a private network protected by a proxy, firewall, or VPN.
It can run the same scenario from scheduled Synthetic tests against changes deployed in a local server running on your development environment (such as a dev laptop), or in a CI/CD pipeline where your application is deployed in an ephemeral environment that lasts the same amount of time as the CI/CD job, or in a private staging environment.
Continuous Testing provides a testing tunnel which allows the Synthetic managed location to reach private environments. For more information, see Testing While Using Proxies, Firewalls, or VPNs.
Further reading
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
