Performance testing is another topic that cloud-native tends to turn on its head. Systems built on traditional architectures often forgo performance testing, because it can be a long and tedious process, but ultimately pay the price when major bottlenecks are eventually discovered in production. On the flip side, performance testing often yields little valuable information, because traditional architectures typically have a fairly low level of observability. These performance tests largely treat the system as a black box with little or cumbersome white-box monitoring.
Cloud-native systems are composed of bounded isolated components and leverage value-add cloud services. The performance surface area of these characteristics is extremely different from traditional systems. Bounded isolated components share no resources other than event streaming. They perform no inter-component synchronous communication. All synchronous communication is performed within the component against value...