Docker Testcontainers Now Available on Red Hat’s OpenShift

PARIS — Docker‘s Testcontainers Cloud are now directly on Red Hat‘s OpenShift. This means that a lot of work around using these containers for testing and compliance and other aspects of CD are now directly available within the OpenShift cluster. This is also a boon for the Java community, for which Testcontainers Cloud is popular, while it does accommodate different languages other than Java.
But first of all, why should you care about CI with Testcontainers Cloud? It’s because Testcontainers Cloud — which Docker acquired to purchase AtomicJar in December — offers developers a way past their otherwise often isolated developer environment. Without certain CI platforms and tools, a developer might not have access to the outer shell or the cluster directly beyond the application-development process. So, once it might be loaded or utilized or integrated into the cluster on Amazon AWS ECS, for example, it might be thrown back to the developer for more work.
Whereas with the Docker Testcontainers Cloud, it can be reconfigured or tested directly during the CI process, thus saving a lot of headaches. Now the fact that it’s available for testing and other aspects, whether it be policy and compliance, governance, etc., means that developers can iterate locally. They can benefit from workloads running in a secure way on OpenShift clusters.
Testcontainers Cloud is described as an open source framework for providing “throwaway” lightweight instances of test dependencies, according to Docker containers documentation. By defining dependencies as code directly in your tests, repeatable tests are made easier. Testcontainers Cloud libraries exist for all popular languages in addition to Java, including Golang .NET, Node.js, Rust and Python. The unit tests enable tests to be run both locally and in the CI.
Again, the code is checked and vetted for CI during the development process. Transparency has been added during this development so that they’re not just throwing code over the fence onto the cluster and then it potentially being kicked back, which too often happens, sapping developer, SRE and other stakeholders’ time.
Now, Testcontainers Cloud is directly integrated under the Docker umbrella and are accessible on Docker Hub and are integrated directly with OpenShift. As Docker CTO Justin Cormack told The New Stack during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Paris, “There’s a big overlap between test container users and Red Hat users. This is a Java community.”
Moreover, “Java is where Testcontainers Cloud started, although it’s now available for other languages as well. But Java is still the strongest core community,” Cormack said. “And Red Hat has a big Java presence as well. So there’s lots of people doing that.”
Cormack noted that Docker Testcontainers Cloud represents Docker offering an on-prem cloud offering with the control plane provided by Docker and the data plane stays on your cluster, Cormack said. “So, this is developers and people who are not just developers, appealing to the REHL users and OpenShift people, who also use Docker containers,” Cormack said.”Before, when you had to try and build something like that yourself, it was really difficult for various technical reasons and really messy. You were spinning up containers while you were already in a container.”
Reducing Cognitive Load
As Red Hat’s Thomas Qvarnström, a product manager, and Sergei Egorov, vice president of product and engineering at Docker who co-created Testcontainers Cloud wrote in a blog post, reducing developers’ cognitive load is key to increasing their productivity. They referenced statistics from a Salesforce survey that revealed that 76% of organizations reported cognitive load on developers is so high that it is a source of low productivity. Testcontainers Cloud can be seen as a way to reduce cognitive overload and increase productivity by integrating the CI support with platform engineering, Qvarnström, and Qvarnström and Egorov wrote. According to Gartner, by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.
“Red Hat and the Testcontainers Cloud team at Docker have partnered to provide the full power of Testcontainers Cloud in OpenShift while still taking full advantage of corporate governance, security and compliance, and the overall flexibility of the platform,” Qvarnström and Egorov wrote.