The importance of solution testing has always been present but with rapid iterations of a fully flexible forwarding platform the target test suite must be able to adapt. Each change runs the chance of breaking the testing setup and pipeline.
However, with the introduction of custom forwarding pipelines more efficient, fully automated and intent-based validation strategies are possible.
Our approach uses automated test packets/flows that are seeded by the underlying p4 instructions. Instead of planning the tests at each stage of the pipeline, we are leveraging virtualization and container technology to model the topology and configs while generating automatic packets based on intended traffic flows.
Traditional testing pipelines include many points of potential breakage and in this discussion we'll focus on these integration points as well as how we are able to mitigate the disruption to pipelines with new testing strategies.
