If you're building microservices and still hand-writing mocks for your API dependencies, your tests are lying to you. The mock says one thing, the actual service does another, and you find out in production. Every team hits this problem, and most teams just live with it.
Microcks is a CNCF Sandbox project that takes your existing API contracts such as OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, gRPC protobufs, GraphQL schemas, Postman collections and turns them into live, running mock endpoints. No glue code. No maintenance. The mock stays in sync with the spec because it IS the spec.
In this talk, I'll cover:
How Microcks actually works under the hood i,e. the architecture, how it handles multi-protocol support across REST, gRPC, GraphQL, and event-driven APIs like Kafka and MQTT. This isn't a surface-level overview and I'll walk through how the engine parses different artifact formats and generates mocks from them.
Then I'll do a live demo. I'll take an OpenAPI spec, import it into Microcks, spin up mock endpoints, hit them, and then run contract conformance tests, all in real time. You'll see exactly what the developer workflow looks like from zero to working mocks.
I'll also cover where Microcks fits in the broader testing landscape, how it compares to WireMock, Pact, and Testcontainers, and why it's not an either/or but a different layer in your testing strategy. And how you plug it into CI/CD so contract checks run on every pull request