Cloud Native Testing Podcast

In this episode of the Cloud Native Testing Podcast, Ole Lensmar sits down with Sahana Nagabhushan to tackle the complexities of software lifecycle inefficiencies and developer productivity.Drawing from her extensive product management experience at Fidelity Investments and Workday, Sahana breaks down why companies burn millions of dollars and years of engineering time building custom Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) like Backstage. Instead of relying solely on generic frameworks, she advocates for implementing a "production readiness layer"—a critical bridge between writing code and shipping it confidently to live environments.Ole and Sahana also dive deep into the realities of AI in modern software development. They discuss why AI-generated code still desperately requires human oversight, the current limitations of AI in generating deterministic tests, and the strategic value of integrating existing top-tier tools (like Testkube) to maintain high-quality standards without reinventing the wheel.Key Takeaways:The Cost of DIY Platforms: Why building internal developer portals from scratch can cost companies up to $16 million with delayed ROI.Defining Production Readiness: How companies can create a "trust layer" to ensure code is fully tested, governed, and truly ready for deployment.Backstage vs. Purpose-Built Tools: A candid discussion on why generic plugin frameworks might not solve core quality and testing issues.AI's Role in Testing: Why human context, sentiment, and oversight remain crucial when navigating AI-generated code and test creation.

Welcome to the first edition of the Cloud Native Testing Podcast for 2026! In this episode, host Ole Lensmar is joined by Yacine Kheddache to dive deep into Microcks, a CNCF Sandbox project dedicated to API mocking and simulation.As cloud-native architectures grow more complex, the need to decouple services during development is critical. Yacine explains how Microcks serves as a "Swiss Army Knife" for developers, offering a single solution to mock and test REST, gRPC, GraphQL, and Event-Driven protocols (like Kafka and NATS). They discuss the tool's evolution from a centralized Kubernetes operator to a developer-friendly utility that runs natively in IDEs and pipelines, enabling true "shift left" testing.Later in the conversation, they explore the intersection of API testing and Artificial Intelligence. Yacine details how Microcks is embracing the AI era by using Copilots to generate mock data and leveraging the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to make existing APIs accessible to LLMs.Key Topics Discussed:The CNCF Journey: Microcks’ status as a community-driven Sandbox project.Polyglot Support: Mocking REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and AsyncAPI with one tool.The Testing Lifecycle: How to reuse mock data artifacts for automated contract and conformance testing in CI/CD.Shift Left: Moving testing from QA environments to local developer laptops and IDEs.AI & MCP: Generating datasets with AI and exposing APIs as tools for AI Agents using the Model Context Protocol.

In this episode, Ole Lensmar joins Richard Li, founder of Polar Sky, to explore how testing strategies must evolve for the age of AI. They discuss the journey of cloud-native tools like Telepresence and Richard's key insight for agentic coding: using automated tests as the "context" to guide AI behavior, rather than relying on complex prompts to describe system rules.The conversation also digs into the mechanics of building AI-driven software, emphasizing why "evals" are critical for measuring success. Richard shares practical strategies for treating evaluations as data management problems and explains how his team uses simple AI agents to "babysit" CI pipelines and automatically resolve flaky tests.Topics discussed:The Evolution of Telepresence: Moving from local debugging to headless execution in CI pipelines.Tests as Context: Why running a test suite is more effective than complex prompting for AI agents.Agentic Coding Strategy: Shifting focus from unit tests to integration and behavioral verification.AI Evals: Why evaluation is the most critical aspect of building reliable AI products.Babysitting CI: Using simple AI agents to identify and retry flaky tests automatically.

On this episode of the Cloud Native Testing podcast, Ole Lensmar welcomes Matt McLane from Doc Network to discuss how they completely transformed their development and testing lifecycle. Matt details their journey away from a slow, manual deployment process—which involved risky ad-hoc testing on a staging environment connected to production—to a modern, automated workflow built for quality and speed. By implementing tools like GitHub Actions, Argo CD, and Cargo, they built a pipeline where testing is a core component, not an afterthought.The conversation dives deep into their cloud-native testing strategy. Matt explains how integrating Playwright for end-to-end tests created automated quality gates, giving them confidence with every deployment. He also shares their approach to non-functional testing with k6 to ensure their application can handle high-traffic events. A key highlight is their use of Tilt to spin up ephemeral environments for every pull request, enabling developers and QA to test features in isolation early in the process. This episode is a practical guide for anyone looking to build a robust testing culture supported by a modern CI/CD pipeline.

What's the connection between your performance tests and your monthly cloud bill? As it turns out, a lot. While many teams struggle with ever-growing Kubernetes costs, the solution isn't just about cutting expenses—it's about improving reliability.In this episode, Ole is joined by Yasmine, COO of CloudBolt, to explore the complex world of Kubernetes rightsizing. Drawing from her experience at Stormforge, Yasmine unpacks the evolution from using performance testing to generate optimization data to the sophisticated machine learning models used today. This conversation goes beyond the tools to address the core challenges every organization faces when trying to tame its cloud-native environment.Tune in to learn:The People Problem: Why there's natural friction between platform teams and developers on resource management, and how to bridge that gap.Reliability First: The crucial mindset shift of viewing rightsizing as a tool for reliability and performance, with cost savings as the byproduct.The Scale Challenge: Why manual scripts and "setting an average" are bound to fail when managing thousands of dynamic workloads.Testing for Confidence: How robust performance and functional testing can validate automated resource changes and give teams the confidence to deploy them.

In this episode, the main conversation is between host Ole Lensmar and guest Atul, who are joined by special guest Dmitry, the CEO of Testkube. Together, they dive deep into the evolving landscape of software testing, framed by Atul's fascinating journey from manual QA to a cloud native developer advocate.The conversation kicks off with Atul sharing his unique career path, highlighting how starting in manual testing gave him a foundational understanding of system failure points—an invaluable edge in the world of development and cloud native technologies.The core of the discussion explores the profound impact of AI on testing and development workflows. Atul points out a critical challenge: while AI can generate code at 10x the previous velocity, our CI/CD pipelines often become a bottleneck, as they weren't designed to handle such a high volume of pull requests. This leads to a crucial conversation about the need to not only scale testing efforts to ensure proper coverage for AI-generated code but also to scale the underlying CI/CD infrastructure itself. They also touch upon the significant software supply chain security concerns that arise when integrating AI agents into the development lifecycle.Shifting focus to the broader ecosystem, the episode examines why testing often feels like an afterthought in the cloud native community, particularly at events like KubeCon. Atul argues that teams are often so focused on application functionality that they're "blinded" to the complexities of testing the entire infrastructure stack—from service meshes to container orchestration—until something breaks. The conversation also covers the nuanced practice of testing in production, balancing its benefits with the inherent risks.

In this illuminating episode, we pull back the curtain on Cloudflare's intricate approach to testing at a truly global scale. Join us as Sachin from Cloudflare's team shares invaluable insights into how they leverage their vast, distributed network to push the boundaries of reliability and performance. We'll explore the critical role of SLOs (Service Level Objectives) and SLIs (Service Level Indicators) in measuring Cloudflare's service reliability, and why error budgeting is essential for managing risk across their massive infrastructure.Discover how Cloudflare embraces the often-debated, yet crucial, practice of testing in production to validate real-world performance. Learn how observability becomes their indispensable guide to understanding complex system behavior under immense load. We'll also discuss the power of automated monitoring in catching anomalies, the importance of collaborating with SLO teams within Cloudflare, and how continuous improvement is fueled by accurate metrics and data analysis gleaned from their unique testing environment. Whether you're a DevOps engineer, SRE, or simply curious about how an internet giant ensures its services stand strong, this episode offers actionable strategies and a fascinating look into Cloudflare's blueprint for resilience.

In this episode of the Cloud Native Testing Podcast, Ole Lensmar sits down with Benjamin Wilms, founder and CEO of Steadybit, to explore the role of chaos engineering in building resilient cloud-native systems—from early-stage startups to global enterprises.Benjamin shares how his journey from consulting to founding Steadybit was shaped by one key lesson: the best learning happens when systems fail. He explains how chaos engineering can shift from a manual, reactive effort to a repeatable practice that empowers teams to uncover weaknesses before they cause real-world outages.They also dig into the cultural side of resilience engineering—how game days can bring teams together, why you don’t need massive scale to get started, and what it takes to build an organization where failure leads to progress, not blame.---This podcast is proudly sponsored by Testkube, the cloud-native, vendor-agnostic test execution and orchestration platform that enables teams to run any type of test automation directly within their Kubernetes infrastructure. Learn more at www.testkube.io.

In this episode of the Cloud Native Testing Podcast, Ole Lensmar sits down with Tony Tam, creator of Swagger API (now known as the OpenAPI specification) and a pioneer in API specification standards, to explore the unexpected ways Swagger transformed software testing.Tony shares the origin story of Swagger: from its roots in solving REST client generation to how it became a foundational tool for testing, documentation, and collaboration across teams. He explains how OpenAPI specs gave rise to a new generation of spec-driven testing, enabling everything from automated validation to smarter negative test cases.Whether you're maintaining legacy services, scaling microservices, or figuring out how to test AI-powered workloads in distributed environments, Tony’s insights into API resilience, tooling, and testing culture are not to be missed.--This podcast is proudly sponsored by Testkube, the cloud-native, vendor-agnostic test execution and orchestration platform built for modern infrastructure. Run any test, at any stage, from right inside your Kubernetes cluster.

In this episode of the Cloud Native Testing Podcast, Ole Lensmar sits down with In this episode of the Cloud Native Testing Podcast, Ole Lensmar sits down with Cherif Sahraoui, QA Lead & Consultant working with 50Hertz Transmission—one of Germany’s four major electricity transmission system operators, responsible for delivering power across northern and eastern Germany—to explore the complexities of testing cloud-native applications in highly regulated industries like energy.Cherif shares how his team manages application testing across both cloud and on-prem environments, why manual and exploratory testing still play a crucial role, and how tools like Testkube, Terraform, and ArgoCD help automate quality at scale.They also dig into the cultural side of QA: how to foster shared responsibility for testing across dev and QA teams and why testing in production doesn’t deserve its bad reputation.If you’re working in a regulated space or looking to improve your cloud-native testing strategy, this conversation offers practical takeaways you can apply right away.---This podcast is proudly sponsored by Testkube, the cloud-native, vendor-agnostic test execution and orchestration platform that enables teams to run any type of test automation directly within their Kubernetes infrastructure. Learn more at www.testkube.io

In this episode of the Cloud Native Testing Podcast, Ole Lensmar sits down with Joe Karlsson, Developer Advocate at CloudQuery, to discuss how testing and governance intersect in today’s fast-moving cloud-native environments. They explore what it takes to catch issues like cloud drift, overly permissive configurations, and deprecated services—before they become costly outages.Joe shares real-world insights from his work helping teams bake governance into CI/CD pipelines without slowing down delivery. From debugging GitHub Actions to building a culture of shared responsibility, this episode is packed with practical advice on making governance feel less like red tape—and more like a safety net for scaling teams.---This podcast is proudly sponsored by Testkube, the cloud-native, vendor-agnostic test execution and orchestration platform that enables teams to run any type of test automation directly within their Kubernetes infrastructure. Learn more at www.testkube.io

In this episode of the Cloud Native Testing Podcast, Ole Lensmar sits down with Daniel Bryant, Engineer, Speaker, and Head of Product Marketing at Syntasso, to explore how testing is evolving in modern cloud-native environments. They dive into the critical role platform engineering plays in shaping a healthy testing culture, and how teams can strike the right balance between enforcing standards and empowering developers.Daniel shares hard-won insights on testing in production, infrastructure validation, and why contract testing is essential when working with external dependencies. From technical best practices to organizational mindset shifts, this episode unpacks what it really takes to make testing a first-class citizen in the cloud-native world.--This podcast is proudly sponsored by Testkube, the cloud-native, vendor-agnostic test execution and orchestration platform that enables teams to run any type of test automation directly within their Kubernetes infrastructure. Learn more at www.testkube.io

In this episode, Ole Lensmar talks with Joe Karp, DevOps Architect at UWM, about what it really takes to build a testing culture inside a modern, cloud-native organization. Joe shares how his team intentionally designed clear ownership between developers, QA engineers, and platform teams—and why empowering devs to own their testing is key to scaling quality across hundreds of services.From infrastructure-level chaos testing to critical-path monitoring in production, Joe walks through the tooling, strategies, and cultural shifts that enabled UWM to test across multi-cloud, multi-cluster environments. They discuss why off-the-shelf tools often fall short, how internal platforms should be treated like products, and what it means to build resilience into both systems and teams.--This podcast is proudly sponsored by Testkube, the cloud-native, vendor-agnostic test execution and orchestration platform that enables teams to run any type of test automation directly within their Kubernetes infrastructure. Learn more at www.testkube.io

In this episode, Ole sits down with Oleg Nenashev—CNCF Ambassador, open source advocate, Jenkins Maintainer, and Lead Developer Advocate at Gradle—to unpack the evolving world of cloud native testing. From the rise of integration testing to the role of tools like Testcontainers and WireMock, Oleg shares why modeling realistic systems is more powerful (and more reliable) than traditional mocking. They explore the complexities of testing in Kubernetes and why Java is experiencing a renaissance in the cloud native ecosystem.--This podcast is proudly sponsored by Testkube, the cloud-native, vendor-agnostic test execution and orchestration platform that enables teams to run any type of test automation directly within their Kubernetes infrastructure. Learn more at www.testkube.io

In this episode, Ole sits down with Ramiro Berrelleza, CEO and co-founder of Okteto, to explore the evolution and impact of ephemeral environments in cloud-native development. They discuss the challenges of testing in traditional setups, how Kubernetes enables ephemeral environments, and their growing role beyond testing—spanning customer research, support, and more. The conversation also dives into data management strategies and the seamless integration of ephemeral environments into the development lifecycle, emphasizing faster feedback loops and enhanced collaboration between developers and QA teams.--This podcast is proudly sponsored by Testkube, the cloud-native, vendor-agnostic test execution and orchestration platform that enables teams to run any type of test automation directly within their Kubernetes infrastructure. Learn more at www.testkube.io

In this episode, Ole and Laurent Py of Packmind explore how AI is reshaping software development, particularly in quality assurance and testing. The discussion delves into AI’s dual role in testing—both as a tool for generating tests and as a complement to human critical thinking. They also examine the ongoing importance of exploratory testing, the impact of AI on test execution efficiency, and the challenges junior developers face in an AI-driven landscape. The conversation wraps up with insights into the future of AI in software development, emphasizing the need for a balance between automation and human oversight.--This podcast is proudly sponsored by Testkube, the cloud-native, vendor-agnostic test execution and orchestration platform that enables teams to run any type of test automation directly within their Kubernetes infrastructure. Learn more at www.testkube.io

In this episode, Ole speaks with Mario-Leander Reimer, Managing Director of QAware, about the evolution of testing in cloud-native environments. They discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by shifting left in testing, the responsibilities of developers and QA teams, and the importance of continuous testing. The conversation also touches on the need for holistic quality insights, the role of specialists in quality assurance, and the significance of exploratory testing in maintaining software quality.---This podcast is proudly sponsored by Testkube, the cloud-native, vendor-agnostic test execution and orchestration platform that enables teams to run any type of test automation directly within their Kubernetes infrastructure. Learn more at www.testkube.io

Welcome to the Cloud Native Testing podcast! Meet your host Ole Lensmar—creator of SoapUI, CTO of Testkube, and a long-time advocate for better software testing. We’ll explore the challenges of testing in cloud-native environments, the role of observability, automation, and emerging trends that are shaping the future of testing. Whether you're a tester, developer, or platform engineer, this podcast is for anyone looking to extend their testing strategies into today's cloud native world.Thanks for listening!---This podcast is sponsored by Testkube—the cloud-native testing framework that helps teams automate, orchestrate, and scale their testing workflows in Kubernetes environments. With Testkube, testing shifts left for faster feedback and scales right to meet the demands of modern, distributed systems. Learn more at testkube.io