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Distributed Unit Testing

Cloudera shows off their distributed unit testing framework:

This distributed testing infrastructure started out as a Cloudera hackathon project in 2014. Todd Lipcon and I worked on a shared backend for running test tasks on a cluster, with Todd focusing on onboarding the Apache Kudu (incubating) tests, and myself on Apache Hadoop. Our prototype implementation reduced the runtime of the 1,700+ Hadoop unit tests from 8.5 hours to 15 minutes.

Since then, we’ve spent time improving the infrastructure and on-boarding additional projects. Besides Kudu and Hadoop, our distributed testing infrastructure is also being used by our Apache Hive and Apache HBase teams. We can now run all the Hadoop unit tests in less than 10 minutes!

Finally, we’re happy to announce that both our infrastructure and code are public! You can browse the webUI at http://dist-test.cloudera.org and see all the source code (ASLv2 licensed) at the cloudera/dist_test github repository. This infrastructure is already being used at upstream Apache to run the Kudu pre-commit tests.

This is an interesting look at how to scale out unit tests.  It’s a bit of a long read (especially with all the videos) but worth your time.