When testing applications with date & time sensitive logic, time shift testing presents an essential part of the process.

You’re basically putting your applications through different scenarios, situations like: month, quarter or year end, billing cycle or debt aging, and testing whether the application’s time sensitive logic behaves as expected.

To achieve this, you can use Time Machine to simply create software virtual clocks that won’t require changing the system clock, which also offers vast possibilities for test automation, since changing of system clock is avoided.

Time Machine works by intercepting date & time calls that your application or database makes, and returns virtual time to them.

So, for example, if you want to time travel a database server, you will set up a virtual clock for the database process (PID), or the OS user that owns that process, and any call for date & time to the database would, in fact, return virtual time.

To use Time Machine via Time Machine Operator in an OpenShift cluster, the following actions must be completed:

Time Machine should be first installed on the OpenShift node, where the containers you want to time travel will be running. It is a prerequisite for running of Time Machine in the containers successfully. No license for this copy of Time Machine is needed (license will be needed only for Time Machine inside the container(s)). In case that containers will be running on multiple nodes inside a cluster, each of those nodes must have Time Machine installed as well. For instructions to install Time Machine on the node(s), please refer to the Configuration Guide, section 1. Installing Time Machine on the OpenShift Node.
Once you install Time Operator and deploy the Operand, you need to install Time Machine inside each of the containers you want to time travel. All the necessary installation files are available in the root directory of the newly created container, and you can proceed with following the instructions from the Configuration Guide, section 2. Installing Time Machine Inside the Container. Please note that the container is by default running under a non-root user, but you need to connect to the container as root to install Time Machine (for example, by using a docker native command such as docker exec -it --user root [container name or ID] /bin/bash).
After the installation is completed, the next step is to acquire a license and apply the key inside the container(s). To do so, please follow the instructions from the Configuration Guide, section 3. Licensing Time Machine Inside the Container.
Once Time Machine is installed and licensed, you need to install inside the container the software you want to time travel (e.g. a database server).
Finally, to create and remove virtual clocks inside the container and time travel the application you want, please follow the instructions from the Quickstart guide.

If you receive any support code messages and cannot resolve the issue yourself, please make a note of the support code(s) and contact Solution-Soft.

Solution-Soft
Phone: US 1+ 408 346 1414
Email: support@solution-soft.com
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