Shifting Integration Testing Left, Welcome AtomicJar to boldstart
At boldstart, we have always been big believers in the idea of “what can be shifted left to developers, will be shifted left.” This includes investing on day one in companies like Snyk (shifting security ⬅️), Slim (container optimization), and many others. We also believe that with the complexity of microservices and containers, that a ton of opportunity still remains to help developers and teams be more productive; coding, testing, integrating, troubleshooting, automating, and deploying applications. To that end, we are thrilled to announce that we led the initial round $4 million round in AtomicJar which is on a mission to shift integration testing left and to start a company behind the widely adopted open source project, Testcontainers.
It takes a village to grow a startup, and we’re excited to partner with co-investors Tribe Capital, Chalfen Ventures and the amazing village of startup founders/executives like Snyk co-founder Guy Podjarny and CEO Peter McKay, Abby Kearns (ex-Pivotal, CTO, Puppet), Andrus Adamchik (Apache Software Foundation, ObjectStyle), Natalie Diggins (ex-head of cloud strategy/platform Neustar), Leonid Igolnik (ex-Oracle, SignalFX), Dimitri Sirota (co-founder, BigID), Jevgeni Kabanov (co-founder, ZeroTurnaround), Zane Lackey (co-founder, Signal Sciences), Simon Maple (DevRel, Snyk), and Ian Livingstone (co-founder, Manifold.co).
We were first introduced to Sergei Egorov and Richard North by Simon Maple of Snyk. This is how many of our best partnerships are formed, warm introductions from existing founders or team members at portfolio companies. When we first met Sergei and Richard, we were blown away by their vision to make integration testing so easy and joyful that every developer would embrace it. We all know integration testing just sucks and the ability to shift this left to developers and to allow them to test code on real data and not mocks and also automate this process would be a huge win. It would not only speed up overall development but also help bypass errors like this:
Like many boldstart founders, this vision was born out of a mission that was started many years ago. Both Richard and Sergei who are engineers started the Testcontainers project in 2015 where Sergei, joined as an active co-maintainer. Today, it has grown to over 1 million downloads a month. Testcontainers is a Java library that supports JUnit tests, providing lightweight, throwaway instances of common databases, Selenium web browsers, or anything else that can run in a Docker container. The future is quite exciting as the team is hiring engineers to continue to support the Testcontainers community and also release new enterprise features to make it even easier for developers to do integration testing and include in every build — more to come! As applications continue to become more complex and distributed with more dependencies, the need for AtomicJar is only increasing as companies want and need to find these integration problems earlier in the software development lifecycle, i.e, shift left.
As Capital One blogged, “Testcontainers originally started as a way to programmatically create throwaway Docker containers. Because of the flexibility of Docker images, Testcontainers modules can now spin up containers with databases, web browsers, or mock AWS endpoints. This is what makes Testcontainers powerful for functional testing — it provides a flexible way of standing up dependencies before your code starts.”
There is already massive uptake and developer ❤️ as evidenced by the over 1 million downloads a month in the Testcontainers open source project. What began as way to let developers directly test their code, “test with containers” against everything from data stores and databases (e.g. Redis, PostgreSQL), to anything else that can run in a Docker container (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Selenium, etc.) has exploded in usage as it powers over 100,000 builds per day for companies like Spotify, Google, Instana, Oracle, Zalando, and many more.
We’re excited to partner with Sergei and Richard as they are on a mission to make integration testing easier for developers across the entire software development lifecycle. AtomicJar is giving developers simpler methods for testing with containers and anything running inside containers, against the many dependencies their code integrates with in production.
Welcome to the boldstart family and we’re excited for the journey ahead!