The industry-wide move to continuous integration (CI) build, and test presents a challenge for the integration world due to the number and variety of resource dependencies involved, such as databases, MQ-based services, REST endpoints, etc. While it is quite common to automate testing using dedicated services (a “test” or “staging” database, for example), the fixed number of these services limits the number of builds that can be tested and therefore limits the agility of integration development.
Containerization provides a way to increase CI build scalability without compromising quality by allowing a database to be created for each run and then deleted again after testing is complete. This does not require the integration solution to be deployed into containers in production and is compatible with deploying to integration nodes: only the CI pipeline needs to be able to use containers and only for dependent services.