How Balanced Automates Testing and Continuously Deploys

As a payments company, we have very little room for error. Our customers count on us to be up and running constantly, since if we’re not up, they can’t do business. They also count on us to be innovative, to release new features that make their lives easier. These goals sometimes come into conflict with each other, since any time we have a new feature to release, or another deploy to make, there’s an inherent risk of breakage. To mitigate that risk, we’ve devised a few ways to minimize our chances of introducing bugs or regressions.

Tests. Lots of tests.

From the very beginning, Balanced has had extensive unit tests. We follow the Model-View-Controller pattern, and each of these sets of components has its own set of unit tests. When taken all together, these tests provide a good baseline level of confidence that our application works the way we think it should. However…

Unit tests are not enough!

Balanced (the company) runs a number of separate services internally – mostly written in Python, of which Balanced (the service) is just one. This service has to interact with our fraud services, our vaulting services, our dashboard service, and so on, and all these interactions need to be tested. Unit tests alone are not sufficient to verify all these interactions.

For example, our fraud system may include a field called csc_check in its responses, containing information about whether the card security code provided on a transaction was a match. Balanced may have examples of this response in its unit tests, making sure that it can handle all the values it may receive, and life is good.

Suppose we decide that a better name for this field is security_code_check . Since the CSC check can go by many names this should be fine, right? So we update our fraud system with the new name everywhere, its unit tests all pass, and we deploy it. However, since we forgot to update the Balanced service, it has no idea that this field has a new name. Consequently, Balanced (the service) doesn’t know how to get the information it needs and we start returning internal server errors to all of our clients (and filling our own emails with system warnings). Our unit tests were not sufficient to tell us that this small change to our fraud system was potentially a breaking change to our system as a whole.

Even if services are well-tested in isolation, this does not address the interactions between them. These service-level interactions need coverage. This was the problem that we set out to solve.

The process

We use Jenkins for automating our testing and deployment. We have a number of jobs configured, each one performing a specific function.

Jenkins listens for commits to the release branch of our various services. When a commit is pushed, it begins the testing and deployment process, and runs through a number of jobs.

This diagram represents the various stages of testing that our Balanced service must go through in order to be deployed to our production environment. Our other services follow similar paths.

Unit tests The first step any deploy must go through is running the unit tests that belong to that service. The engineer committing the changes to be deployed theoretically should have ensured that these tests pass before committing, since no one likes the guy (or gal) who commits broken code, but sometimes people are forgetful, and sometimes what works on one engineer’s machine doesn’t work on another’s. A common mistake is to install some new library manually, but forget to update the requirements file – unit tests would pass on the committer’s machine, but fail when run elsewhere. Running unit tests in a fresh environment catches this type of problem. After setting up our environment, we run our tests in a manner similar to this: # Unit tests nosetests -sv --with-id --with-xunit --with-xcoverage \ --cover-package=balanced_service --cover-erase # Pylint python -c "import sys, pylint.lint; pylint.lint.Run(sys.argv[1:])" \ --output-format=parseable --include-ids=y --reports=n \ balanced_service/ | tee pylint.out # Pep8 find balanced_service -name \*.py | xargs pep8 | tee pep8.out We use Nose as our test runner and we leverage a number of plugins to help streamline the testing process. We wrote a small plugin, nose-setenv, to help us configure our tests for the environments we run them in and we leverage the Xunit plugin to produce an XML output file containing the results of the unit tests, which Jenkins uses to create graphs like this: As you can see, our tests are mostly stable, with an occasional failure that necessitates a quick fix. Build #806 shows what happens when requirements aren’t updated properly – every single test fails due to a bad import statement, and the engineer who forgot to update the requirements file sheepishly commits a one-line fix. We also run Pep8 and Pylint over our code, to track violations of style and good Python practices. Jenkins’ Violations plugin can fail the build if code quality falls below a certain threshhold, but we use this for informational purposes only. We run our unit tests using nosexcover, which gives us an XML coverage report file. This is used by the Cobertura Jenkins plugin to generate coverage graphs like this: The coverage output is also passed to the next step… Coverage enforcement As code in a project is added or changed, the tendency can sometimes be for the number and quality of tests to fall behind. An engineer adding a simple new feature or fixing a bug may reason that the workings are so clear, or the change so minor, that testing is superfluous and skip adding a test. Over time this can lead to a lack of coverage by unit tests, so they don’t provide as much confidence as they once did. This step measures the coverage of the unit tests performed in the previous step, and aborts the build if coverage drops below a minimum threshold. For instance, for the Balanced service, we require that all models and controllers have at least 95% test coverage, which means that unit tests must exercise at least 95% of the code for the build to continue. Every engineer here has felt the pain of committing code and receiving an email stating that the coverage level has dropped to 94.47%, and then having to hunker down and write more tests, but this ensures that unit test coverage remains comprehensive. (Jenkins’ Cobertura plugin also enforces coverage levels, but at a granularity that wasn’t sufficient for us.) Staging deploy After the self-contained unit tests have passed and been found to provide sufficient test coverage, we deploy the service to our internal staging environment. This is a test in and of itself – if after the deploy the service fails to start up properly, it may indicate that a server setting has been misconfigured, and this code isn’t ready for the production environment. Here is also where we test any database migrations on a duplicate of our production database – for instance, if a constraint is added such that a previously NULLable column is now NOT NULL, but old rows haven’t been backfilled appropriately, the migration fails and the build is aborted. Since this is tested on a copy of the actual production database, we can be reasonably sure that a migration won’t miss any tricky edge cases. Once the staging deploy job has completed, we use Jenkins’ Join plugin to run the next series of jobs simultaneously, and only proceed further if they all succeed. Acceptance/suite tests Once the code is running in our staging environment, we can run a battery of tests against it to test the integration with other services. Each of our various clients comes with a suite of tests (e.g., our balanced-python and balanced-java suites), which are all run against the staging server to ensure that the server behaves in a way that the client is expecting. Most of these tests depend on the correct interaction of Balanced with our other services, but we take it a step farther with our acceptance suite, which consists of two more jobs. acceptance server runs a suite of tests designed to go all the way through our stack, onto our banking partners’ test environments. For instance, we can pass test card data on to our acquiring bank and verify that they receive well-formed requests from us, as well as verifying that we can properly handle their responses. acceptance runs many of the same tests as acceptance server , but uses the Werkzeug test client and patches Python’s requests library to allow us to run all our servers in the same in-memory context. This allows us to set arbitrary breakpoints and to patch/mock different objects at various points throughout the request lifecycle, all the way down through our stack, to assert that what is actually happening matches our understanding. Running all servers in-memory also makes it trivially easy to use nosexcover and the Cobertura plugin again, this time to measure coverage of our test suite throughout the entire stack. If the Balanced service is well-tested by the acceptance suite, but the fraud system isn’t being exercised enough, it’s easy to see this here. Production deploy Once all these tests have passed, we’re confident that the new code hasn’t introduced any regressions and is ready to be deployed. To reduce the chance of operator error, our testing server performs deploys for us as well. We use Fabric and run a deploy task that pulls the code from our GitHub repo, removes an instance of the app from our load balancer (HAProxy), loads the new code, and puts the app back into HAProxy, for each machine running our code.

Confidence in quality

From start to finish, a deploy of Balanced takes about 10 minutes. During that time, we run over 950 unit tests, and another 200-300 integration and acceptance tests. We often deploy upwards of ten times a day, over multiple services.

Deploys do occasionally become blocked due to a failing test. Every time this happens, we calmly fix the cause of the failure and start the process again – there’s no rushing to fix a bug that’s suddenly made it out into the wild, because it never got a chance to make it out of our staging environment.

This freedom to iterate quickly without fear of breaking things is a huge win for us. This testing architecture is the result of a concerted effort we made to ensure that we have a consistently high level of quality, and it pays enormous dividends. It has made deploys much more risk-free, and greatly increased our ability to move quickly and introduce new features while minimizing the introduction of new bugs.

Final Thoughts

Balanced still has a long way to go. This solution works for now, but we’re always looking for ways to improve. We have to deal with a level of quality that catches problems early to let us move fast and break things, just not in a catastrophic way.

If these kinds of problems interest you and you’re looking for a real challenge, contact us! We’re always looking for sharp and talented individuals that can make an impact.

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