Going live with bugs in the code is a risky roll of the dice as it could lead to unplanned outages, and software downtime leads to loss of revenue and of reputation. Analysts at Gartner Research have estimated that downtime can cost companies as much as $140,000 to $540,000 per hour. Google, for example, saw global outages of its Gmail and Drive products in March, affecting customers throughout Australia, U.S., Europe, and Asia. Facebook and Instagram also suffered worldwide outages in March, leaving users unable to access popular apps for several hours. Customers expect on-demand access and service; outages weigh heavily on a brand’s reputation as well as its finances.
Unfortunately, with migration from legacy systems to microenvironments in the cloud, outages and downtime pose a growing and serious problem. Gone is the time when teams could beta test with customers over time to flag real-time bugs. With current quality testing tools, developers often don’t know how a new software version will perform in production or if it even will work in production. The Cloudbleed bug is an example of this problem. In February 2017, a simple coding error in a software upgrade from security vendor Cloudflare led to a serious vulnerability discovered by a Google researcher several months later. Although Cloudflare still worked, the bug meant that it was leaking sensitive data.
