Who Needs GameDays? Resilience Testing using Testcontainers

The text discusses the importance of testing resilience patterns in software applications, particularly using a newly open-sourced library by Steadybit that facilitates writing resilience tests without additional server software. The library, available on Maven Central and GitHub, is demonstrated through the integration of resilience tests in a sample order processing application that communicates via a message queue. It describes the process of testing the application’s ability to handle message broker failures using Steadybit's Testcontainers library to simulate network delays and outages. By introducing asynchronous message dispatch and implementing a system to track and reconcile unsent messages, the application maintains functionality even when the broker fails. The article emphasizes that while resilience tests are essential for quickly identifying issues and preventing regressions, they complement rather than replace comprehensive Chaos Engineering explorations like GameDays, which offer broader insights into system behavior under failure conditions in complex architectures.