Guest: Eli Aleyner (LinkedIn)
Company: AtomicJar (Twitter)

The current economic landscape has companies reducing their workforce and requiring their developers to be more effective. They are looking for powerful tools, such as AtomicJar’s Testcontainers, not just through the lens of efficiency, but more importantly, through the lens of developer satisfaction.

In this episode of TFiR: Newsroom, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Eli Aleyner, Co-Founder of AtomicJar, to talk about the beta launch of Testcontainers Cloud, the cloud version of their highly successful testing/productivity tool, as well as the recent Series A funding they received.

Key highlights of this video interview:

• Testcontainers allow developers to become more effective by doing unit testing with real dependencies, i.e., they can write self-contained tests and run them without requiring a central environment.
• Testcontainers Cloud allows developers to run those dependencies not just on the local machine, but on the public cloud. They benefit from the scalability and reproducibility of seeing the same outcome of their tests, whether they’re running it as an individual developer or as a team.
• AtomicJar specifically focuses on developer-led testing, i.e., testing that is done as part of the inner development cycle before the code is deployed anywhere. Aleyner says they want to make it simple for developers to do better testing as they’re writing code.
• To be productive, developers want to write code, see it execute, and be able to iterate as quickly as possible. The Testcontainers tool allows that and with Testcontainers Cloud, they’re able to leverage the power of the cloud to do it even more effectively. They are able to do a lot more with what they have and they’re able to test and reproduce in isolation.
• The Testcontainers Cloud beta version is available to the public for free. People who would find the most use out of it are those who are already using Testcontainers. However, Aleyner says companies that don’t use Testcontainers are coming in and wanting to learn the power of their tools.
• Many providers offer operational tools, i.e., written for operators but were modified so developers can use them. AtomicJar approaches this from a different angle: they start with the tools that developers use today and give them more power in their development environment. So developers no longer need to learn how to do YAML files or how to configure environments. AtomicJar makes it super simple for developers to get the same benefits, but without leaving their IDE.
• Users of Testcontainers Cloud span the spectrum, from small companies or individual freelancers that are trying to test it to huge companies who use it to standardize and scale Testcontainers effectively.
• A huge use case is to have consistency between how companies are running their tests in CI and desktop and also in terms of their computational infrastructure.
• AtomicJar received a $25 million Series A funding led by Insight Partners, with participation from their existing investors and a number of high-impact angels. The money will go towards growth and expanding their engineering and go-to-market teams. The company currently has 23 staff in 10 countries.
• Their goal is to come out of beta in next month’s VR because of the huge opportunity ahead. The Testcontainers software has had 100 million downloads, most of which came in the last 8 months.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.