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Move Fast and Consumer Driven Contract Test Things

Alon Pe'er
February 17, 2017

Move Fast and Consumer Driven Contract Test Things

At SoundCloud, we've found that teams move faster when we've moved away from a monolith architecture to one based around microservices. Unfortunately, this new type of architecture has been prone to cascading failures when breaking changes go unnoticed in one of our services' API's. These failures have had a devastating impact on our system's uptime, but we've found that we can mitigate some of this risk by introducing consumer driven contract tests.

Consumer driven contract tests allow each consumer service and client to define their expectations and interactions with each provider service upstream, and for provider services to verify all of these contracts as part of their build pipeline. Breakage avoided.

In this talk we’ll go through SoundCloud’s process of breaking the monolith into microservices, then see how PACT-based contract tests were introduced, and discuss some of the challenges of adopting such tests in an already-established microservices culture.

Video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ0UGY2-YYI

Alon Pe'er

February 17, 2017
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Transcript

  1. About SoundCloud a cloud full of sounds 135M tracks, 175M

    listeners, 12 hours/minute 300+ services / 50+ teams
  2. Agenda • Testing, monolith style • My first steps @

    SoundCloud • Introducing contract tests • Pactifying our services • Caveats • QA Q&A
  3. • One service, one client • API changes are easy

    • One client team to sync with for migrations • API deprecation is easy Testing, monolith style The good ol’ days
  4. • Different requirements per client => Code complexity increases •

    Harder to deploy without breaking at least one client Testing, monolith style Mo clients, mo problems
  5. • More manual QA expensive, slow, prone to human error,

    doesn’t scale • More end-to-end tests Maintenance nightmare, flaky, slow, creates bottlenecks Testing, monolith style Mo clients, mo problems
  6. My first steps @ SoundCloud “A lack of trust in

    the acceptance tests caused us to largely ignore the warnings they generated.” “We couldn’t figure out the impact of the broken acceptance tests, and assumed the only problem was the tests themselves, rather than the underlying code.” “The commit went through as there weren't any tests for the serialisation from the client to the backend.” Digging into post-mortems © ofsmallthings
  7. Unit tests are not enough Introducing contract tests “#cake” >>

    { result = call(“cake”) assert(result == “lie”) } GET “/cake”: return “lie”
  8. Unit tests are not enough Introducing contract tests GET “/cake”:

    return “truth” “#cake” >> { result = call(“cake”) assert(result == “lie”) }
  9. Unit tests are not enough Introducing contract tests import JsonLibFoo

    GET “/cake”: return toJson(current_state) // { “current_state” : “lie” } import JsonLibFoo “#cake” >> { result = fromJson(call(“cake”)) assert(result == “lie”) }
  10. Unit tests are not enough Introducing contract tests import JsonLibBar

    GET “/cake”: return toJson(current_state) // { “currentState” : “lie” } import JsonLibBar “#cake” >> { result = fromJson(call(“cake”)) assert(result == “lie”) }
  11. Introducing contract tests How this works? ➢ Requesting “/cake”. ➢

    Expecting a JSON response with a key “current_state”. ➢ Asserting deserialization of the response succeeds. import JsonLibFoo GET “/cake”: return toJson(current_state) // { “current_state” : “lie” } Consumer Provider
  12. What’s Pact? Pactifying our services • A family of frameworks

    designed for contract testing. • Supports JSON over HTTP. • Impl. for Java, Scala, Go, Ruby, .Net, Swift, JS etc. • Tests run locally, no external dependencies.
  13. Pactifying our services Provider side verification • Collect pact files

    from consumers and verify them all. • Keep your provider environment isolated. ◦ Dockerized databases. ◦ Test doubles for upstream services.
  14. Pactifying our services Provider states INSERT likes Set state: “User

    1000 has liked 2 tracks” Likes App Likes DB
  15. Pactifying our services Provider states INSERT likes Set state: “User

    1000 has liked 2 tracks” HTTP Request: GET /likes/1000 Likes App Likes DB
  16. Pactifying our services Provider states HTTP Request: GET /likes/1000 HTTP

    Response: 200 OK INSERT likes Set state: “User 1000 has liked 2 tracks” Likes App Likes DB
  17. Pactifying our services Provider states Likes App Likes DB HTTP

    Response: 200 OK INSERT likes Set state: “User 1000 has liked 2 tracks” HTTP Request: GET /likes/2000 HTTP Response: 404 Not Found Set state: “User 2000 has liked no tracks” HTTP Request: GET /likes/1000 DELETE likes
  18. Pactifying our services Pact broker • Share pact files between

    projects. • API for pact frameworks to fetch all pacts by provider. • Support for versioning and tagging. • Useful UI and visualization of the network.
  19. Pactifying our services Our CI pipeline Push new change Generate

    consumer contracts Deploy Upload pacts & tag with ‘prod’ Consumer pipeline
  20. Pactifying our services Our CI pipeline Push new change Deploy

    Upload pacts & tag with ‘prod’ Consumer pipeline Push new change Verify all ‘prod’-tagged pacts Deploy Provider pipeline Generate consumer contracts
  21. • Communication is key. • New moving parts. • Learning

    curve per pact framework. • Frameworks are WIP. Caveats
  22. • Communication is key. • New moving parts. • Learning

    curve per pact framework. • Frameworks are WIP. • Postel's law (the robustness principle). Caveats
  23. • Communication is key. • New moving parts. • Learning

    curve per pact framework. • Frameworks are WIP. • Postel's law (the robustness principle). • Provider side setup is time consuming. Caveats
  24. • Communication is key. • New moving parts. • Learning

    curve per pact framework. • Frameworks are WIP. • Postel's law (the robustness principle). • Provider side setup is time consuming. • Automating consumer-triggered provider verification. Caveats
  25. • Communication is key. • New moving parts. • Learning

    curve per pact framework. • Frameworks are WIP. • Postel's law (the robustness principle). • Provider side setup is time consuming. • Automating consumer-triggered provider verification. • Adoption is essential. Caveats