Continuous API Mocking and Testing with Microcks and Testkube #TestConEU25

In dynamic API development, efficiency and reliability are crucial. This talk introduces three powerful cloud-native frameworks: Microcks, Keptn, and Testkube.

Microcks enables automated API mocking and testing within a Kubernetes-native environment, supporting various API standards such as REST, gRPC, and GraphQL. Keptn provides event-driven orchestration for testing and quality assurance, ensuring smooth API deployments. Testkube offers a flexible test execution environment for Kubernetes, allowing API tests to be triggered based on events.

We will demonstrate how these tools accelerate API development, enhance software delivery agility, and ensure robust, standards-compliant, and well-tested APIs.

Transcript

1. qaware.de Continuous API Mocking and Testing with Microcks, Keptn and Testkube Mario-Leander Reimer mario-leander.reimer@qaware.de @LeanderReimer #CloudNativeNerd
2. 2 Mario-Leander Reimer Managing Director | CTO @LeanderReimer #cloudnativenerd #qaware #gernperDude
3. 3 APIs are everywhere!
4. A Quick History Lesson on Inter Process Communication (IPC) QAware | 4 REST 2000 by Roy T. Fielding RPC 14.01.1976 RFC 707 RPC Oct 1983 Birrel und Nielson DCOM 18.09.1996 Win95 HTTP/1.0 Mai 1996 RFC 1945 CORBA 1.0 Oct 1991 CORBA 2.0 August 1996 HTTP/1.1 Juni 1999 RFC 2616 CORBA 2.3 Juni 1999 Java RMI Feb 1997 JDK 1.1 XML-RPC 1998 SOAP 1.2 2003 CORBA 3.0 July 2002 RESTful Applications 2014 (?) HTTP/2.0 Mai 2015 RFC 7540 gRPC 1.0 Aug 2016 GraphQL Sep 2015 JSON-RPC v1 2005 v2 2010
5. QAware | 5 Monolithic systems were relatively easy to implement and test. ▪ Almost no distribution or IPC ▪ Homogene technology stack ▪ Developed by one team ▪ Long release and test cycles ▪ Low infrastructure complexity ▪ Managed infrastructure
6. QAware | 6 Microservice-based systems with many APIs can be complex and cumbersome to implement and test. ▪ High distribution with various communication channels ▪ Heterogeneous technology stacks ▪ Implemented by many independent teams ▪ Short release and test cycles ▪ High infrastructure complexity with many components ▪ New operating model with more responsibility for the developers
7. Monolithic, linear CI/CD pipelines are suboptimal and will result in delayed feedback and long release cycles. QAware | 7 At the beginning often performed in parallel. Later on, delayed until the end of sprint or the release. Functionality vs. Performance vs. Security? Which one first? External access to cluster required Long running and flaky A lot of CI tooling required Only run on commit!
8. QAware | 8 Microservice-based systems with many APIs can be complex and cumbersome to implement and test. Cluster Microservice A Microservice B Microservice C External System X Backend System Y Team A Team C Team B Unknown GraphQL REST gRPC gRPC SOAP Kafka Mock Mock
9. QAware | 9 Agentic AI workloads with many APIs are even more complex and cumbersome to implement and test. Cluster Agent A Agent B MCP Server External System X Backend System Y Team A Team C Team B Unknown Voice MCP A2A MCP SOAP Mock Mock
10. Challenges of Modern API Development and Testing ▪ Manual mocking and testing slows down development & integration processes. ▪ Existing tools lack good support for mocking and testing on Kubernetes. ▪ Managing multiple API protocols (e.g. REST, gRPC, GraphQL, …) is complex. ▪ Time-consuming deployments of APIs across environments. ▪ Inconsistent support for standards leading to poor integration quality. 10 QAware | 10
11. lreimer/microcks-testkube
12. Microcks - Kubernetes native tool for API Mocking & Testing ▪ What is Microcks? – Kubernetes-native tool for API mocking and testing. – Supports REST, gRPC, GraphQL, SOAP, Asynchronous ▪ Key Features – Automatic generation of mocks based on OpenAPI, AsyncAPI specs. – Integrated testing for contract validation. – Seamless support for Kubernetes environments. – Easy pipeline integration and good CLI support. ▪ Benefits – Faster integration with external services. – Reduced manual effort for creating and testing mocks. 12 QAware | 12 microcks/microcks
13. 13 QAware Microcks Architecture
14. Testkube - A cloud-native testing framework for Kubernetes. 14 QAware | 14 kubeshop/testkube ▪ Testkube natively integrates test orchestration and execution into Kubernetes and your CI/CD or GitOps pipeline ▪ Avoids vendor lock-in for test orchestration and execution in CI/CD pipelines ▪ Makes it possible to decouple test execution from build processes; test engineers should be able to run specific tests whenever needed ▪ Makes it easy to run any kind of tests - functional, load/performance, security, compliance, etc. in your clusters, without having to wrap them in docker-images or providing network access ▪ Provides a modular architecture for adding new types of tests and executors
15. Testkube Architecture and Concepts QAware | 15 default testkube Deployment Testkube Dashboard Webhook Receiver Testkube API Server CRDs CI/CD System Dev Executors Deployment trigger flux-system run Mongo DB NATS Minio S3 CLI start store watch Test Trigger SUT Monitoring System Test Workflow
16. Conceptual Architecture QAware | 16 Packages Package publish update Run deploy watch Deploy watch Dev GitOps Build push Checkout Build Test Quality Package Dev Test (E2E, NFA) trigger test Tests run tests upload Update API Schema Definition Push via GH Action Pull via Importer upload
17. Continuous Delivery Pipeline Architecture QAware | 17 Packages Package publish update Run deploy watch Deploy watch Dev GitOps Build push Checkout Build Test Quality Package Dev Test (E2E, NFA) trigger test Tests Quality Cockpit report PO report Build Status Code Quality Test Results Vulnerabilities fitness test promote and deploy?
18. Keptn - Cloud-native application lifecycle management 18 QAware | 18 keptn/lifecycle-toolkit ▪ Deployment observability - Understand Deployment Tasks in Keptn, including pre and post-deployment tasks, to automate and streamline your deployment processes. ▪ Analysis - Validate your deployments with Keptn Analysis using SLIs and SLO. ▪ Multi-Stage Application Delivery - Promote apps across your environments while maintaining consistency and reliability. ▪ Metrics - Bring external metrics into your kubernetes cluster and access them with ease. ▪ Auto App Discovery - Seamlessly merge deployed services into apps to ensure version compatibility between them. ▪ Deployment tasks - Surround the application lifecycle with custom hooks to support complex deployments.
19. 19 QAware https://testkube.io/blog/leveraging-testkube-as-a-quality-gate-in-multi-stage-deployments-with-keptn
20. QAware GmbH | Aschauer Straße 30 | 81549 München | GF: Dr. Josef Adersberger, Michael Stehnken, Michael Rohleder, Mario-Leander Reimer Niederlassungen in München, Mainz, Rosenheim, Darmstadt | +49 89 232315-0 | info@qaware.de Thanks you! Next step? Let's talk. Mario-Leander Reimer Managing Director, CTO mario-leander.reimer@qaware.de +49 151 61314748