Dear developer,
Today we announced that AtomicJar raised a significant Series A funding round and released the public beta of Testcontainers Cloud – a new way to experience Testcontainers that we’re so excited about. But what does it mean for you?
Before Testcontainers, the testing for developers was fragmented and messy. Everyone was either working on their own “per use case” testing library or relying on “traditional” testing practices such as local databases, QA teams, staging environments, manual testing, or… YOLO Driven Development, which is more common than we all want it to be 🙂 And it was painful.
Eli experienced this problem firsthand at AWS, back when he was a founding engineer and when the entire team could fit into a single conference room. The S3 team relied on their staging environment to stabilize software before shipping to production. Yet this approach failed to scale as the volume of changes, people and dependencies increased.
Fast forward to today, you can add a Testcontainers dependency to your test code and start testing applications in minutes with real technologies such as Postgres, Kafka and many others. Commit the changes and have the same tests run on CI. Collaborate with colleagues who can Clone & Run the self-contained project without having to go through a process of setting up the test environment, running commands, reading README.md files, or sharing staging environments. You can do all of this with the confidence that mocks or any other developer-first testing techniques were unable to provide. And you can do it with nearly instant feedback on local changes, straight in your IDE.
That’s not just a library… that’s an experience. The Testcontainers Experience.
The experience that started in Java and now is available in .Net, Go, NodeJS, and other languages, and that has been downloaded more than 100M times.
You are in great company, with Netflix, Uber, Spotify, DoorDash, Wise, Zalando, and many other large and small tech companies sharing that same Testcontainers Experience; and with the most popular frameworks recommending Testcontainers as the testing approach; with vendors creating and maintaining Testcontainers modules for their databases.
Today we are also announcing Testcontainers Cloud, the next step in the Testcontainers Experience, available for you to try in public beta. It isn’t a new version of Testcontainers, but a new way of running Testcontainers-based tests. It’s built to be the easiest and most convenient way of running them, powered by the nearly infinite scale of cloud resources.
We’ve spent the last year building it, inviting early adopters to try this new experience, and making sure that it takes less than 5 minutes to get your Testcontainers-based tests running, from the moment you sign up. In the short period of time we ran our private beta, it didn’t take long for organizations to start relying on Testcontainers Cloud daily. Now they are running Testcontainers-based tests on their laptops (especially the Apple Silicon ones ;)) or in CI pipelines that no longer need to have Docker, leading to more concurrent, elastic and secure builds.
Based on all of the great feedback we’ve gotten from initial Testcontainers Cloud beta users, we’re now ready to invite everyone to have that new experience too, expanding the Testcontainers Experience beyond local. We truly believe that Testcontainers Cloud will allow many more organizations to adopt Testcontainers, while also upgrading the experience of existing Testcontainers users.
The $25M Series A funding that we received from our amazing investors (who believed in the Testcontainers Experience from the first time they heard about it), will go into making you, fellow developer, happier through our continued investment in the Testcontainers Experience. We will do this by maintaining and extending the ever-growing list of Testcontainers Open Source libraries for various languages, and by building exciting new features for Testcontainers Cloud. Short story: we will take care of running the containers for you while you focus on what matters – shipping software with confidence.
Your fellow developers, Sergei & Eli.
