Blog: E2E Testing Best Practices, Reloaded

End-to-end (E2E) testing in Kubernetes is how the project validates functionality with real clusters. Contributors sooner or later encounter it when asked to write E2E tests for new features or to help with debugging test failures. Cluster admins or vendors might run the conformance tests, a subset of all tests in the E2E test suite. The underlying E2E framework for writing these E2E tests has been around for a long time. Functionality was added to it as needed, leading to code that became hard to maintain and use. The testing commons WG started cleaning it up, but dissolved before completely achieving their goals. After the migration to Gingko v2 in Kubernetes 1. 25, I picked up several of the loose ends and started untangling them. This blog post is a summary of those changes. Some of this content is also found in the Kubernetes contributor document about writing good E2E tests and gets reproduced here to raise awareness that the document has been updated. At the moment, the framework is used in-tree for testing against a cluster ( test/e2e ), testing kubeadm ( test/e2e_kubeadm ) and kubelet ( test/e2e_node ). The goal is to make the core test/e2e/framework a package that has no dependencies on internal code and that can be used in different E2E suites without polluting them with features or options that make no sense for them.