Table of Contents
Want a Personalized Feature Set Demo?
Want a Personalized Feature Set Demo?
Table of Contents
The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is more than just another compliance checklist—it’s a call to action for financial services to rethink how they test and validate their digital systems.
From resilience under stress to regulatory traceability, DORA sets a high bar. And if your workloads run in Kubernetes, meeting those expectations can’t rely on traditional, slow-moving testing workflows.
TL;DR
Testkube helps financial services comply with DORA by delivering:
- Continuous resilience testing, disaster recovery test, cyber threats testing
- Full audit trails
- Integrated security and risk validation
- Recovery verification after incidents
- Kubernetes-native execution for speed and security
Whether you're modernizing legacy systems or scaling your cloud-native infrastructure, Testkube provides the testing backbone for secure, auditable, and resilient operations.
Testkube helps teams build DORA compliance into the software delivery process with Kubernetes-native testing that’s secure, scalable, and fully auditable up to critical ICT third party standards.
Here’s how.
1. Continuous Testing for Operational Resilience
DORA requires financial institutions to validate the resilience of critical systems regularly—across functional, security, integration, and failure scenarios. The term evolving around this is ‘party risk management’ relating to planning risk assessments.
What this means for platform teams: testing needs to be continuous, automated, and built into the infrastructure.
How Testkube supports this:
- Multi-environment testing: Run environment-specific test suites for dev, staging, and production—all orchestrated through Kubernetes.
- Shift-left ready: Developers can trigger tests directly using kubectl, the CLI, or API, getting feedback earlier.
- Resilience & stress tests: Schedule load, performance, and failover tests to simulate adverse conditions.
- Post-incident validation: Automatically trigger recovery test suites to confirm service stability after outages or rollbacks from backup systems.
[Developer Commit]
|
v
[CI/CD Pipeline]
|
v
[Testkube Trigger]
|
+--> [Functional Tests (Dev)]
+--> [Performance Tests (Staging)]
+--> [Failover Tests (Prod)]
|
v
[Test Results to Observability Stack (Grafana/Prometheus)]
2. Built-in Auditability and Traceability
DORA expects all testing activity to be traceable. That means logs, test results, timelines, and action history must be readily available for internal reviews or external audits.
How Testkube supports this:
- Immutable test logs: Every test run is recorded with full metadata—timestamps, test source, environment, and results.
- GitOps-native definitions: Store and version test definitions in Git to track every change.
- Trigger history: Monitor which events (e.g., deployments, image changes) triggered which tests.
- Centralized reporting: Push logs and results to Grafana, Prometheus, GCP Monitoring, or any observability platform.
[Test Definition (Git)]
|
[Trigger: ArgoCD deploy / PR merge / ConfigMap update]
|
[Test Execution Pod]
|
+--------------------------+
| Metadata: |
| - Test ID |
| - Timestamp |
| - Trigger Event |
| - Environment |
| - Result |
+--------------------------+
|
[Logs & Results stored → Prometheus / Elastic / Graphana / GCP Monitoring]
All of this makes it easy to prove what was tested, when, and why—without adding manual tracking or audit overhead.
3. Integrated Security & Risk Testing
Security and risk validation aren’t optional under DORA. Tests must account for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and data integrity risks across your digital estate.
How Testkube supports this:
- Plug into your security stack: Run tools like Trivy, OWASP ZAP, or custom bash/python scripts to check for CVEs, API misbehavior, or insecure defaults.
- Policy testing: Automatically detect misconfigured RBAC, network policies, and insecure services.
- CI/CD test gates: Block risky releases by embedding security checks directly in your delivery pipelines.
[CI Job]
|
+---> [Build Image]
|
+---> [Run Trivy Scan via Testkube]
| |
| +-- Pass --> Proceed
| +-- Fail --> Block deploy
|
+---> [Run OWASP ZAP Test]
|
+---> [Deploy via ArgoCD]
With Testkube, every change is security-aware—without needing to reinvent your toolchain.
4. Incident Response and Recovery Validation
DORA emphasizes fast, reliable recovery from ICT incidents—and that includes validating that your fixes actually work.
How Testkube supports this:
- Run tests post-failure: Trigger targeted health or regression tests as soon as incidents are resolved or rollbacks are applied.
- Self-service testing: Developers and SREs can run recovery validation on demand—no pipeline deploy required.
- Low-latency feedback: Tests run in-cluster for fast validation, right where your workloads live. This provides close to instant test results.
[Incident Detected → Alertmanager]
|
[Trigger Testkube Recovery Test Suite]
|
+------------------------------+
| - API Health Check |
| - Database Connectivity |
| - Critical Path E2E Test |
+------------------------------+
|
[Test Results to Grafana + Slack Alert]
Recovery testing should be automatic, not an afterthought. Testkube makes it part of the operational workflow.
5. Reporting for Regulatory Oversight
Supervisory authorities want more than summaries. They expect full visibility into how testing is managed—and proof that your systems are being validated correctly.
How Testkube supports this:
- Exportable execution history: Generate and share logs, results, and artifacts as part of your regulatory documentation.
- Observability integrations: Feed data into your compliance dashboards (Grafana, GCP Monitoring, Datadog, etc.).
- Policy-as-code: Define testing policies as CRDs and enforce them at every stage of the pipeline.
You get compliance visibility without needing to stitch together tooling from scratch.
Why Kubernetes-Native Testing is Key to DORA
Most financial platforms are migrating to Kubernetes—but legacy test frameworks aren’t built for this world. They’re slow to adapt, hard to scale, and tricky to secure.
Testkube is purpose-built for Kubernetes, which means:
- Tests run in-cluster, close to your workloads
- Native RBAC and namespace support for team and service boundaries
- GitOps-compatible, declarative configuration
- Full test orchestration across any tool, written in any language
This isn’t just about passing audits—it’s about building a testing platform that scales with your infrastructure and enforces resilience by default.
Getting Started
Here’s how to begin building DORA-aligned testing with Testkube:
- Deploy Testkube in your QA, staging, and production clusters
- Define test CRDs for your critical services (e.g., trading APIs, payment flows, authentication systems)
- Integrate with your CI/CD tool of choice—GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD
- Export test results to your monitoring and compliance dashboards
- Track test data in the context of incidents, deployments, and environment health
Contact us for a personalized demo or Proof of Concept conversation
Final Thoughts
DORA compliance doesn’t have to be slow or complex. With Testkube, financial institutions can operationalize resilience testing directly in Kubernetes—automated, secure, and always audit-ready.
Whether you’re migrating off legacy systems or already running cloud-native infrastructure, Testkube gives your team the testing control plane needed to stay compliant and resilient.
👉 Learn how other regulated real world teams are using Testkube at testkube.io
