Pattern: Service Integration Contract Test

pattern  

Context

You have applied the Microservice architecture pattern. The application consists of numerous services. Services often invoke other services. You must write automated tests that verify that a service behaves correctly.

Problem

How to easily test that a service provides an API that its clients expect?

Forces

  • End to end testing (i.e. tests that launch multiple services) is difficult, slow, brittle, and expensive.

Solution

A test suite for a service that is written by the developers of another service that consumes it. The test suite verifies that the service meets the consuming service’s expectations.

Examples

Spring Cloud Contract is an open source project that supports this style of testing.

Resulting context

This pattern has the following benefits:

  • Testing a service in isolation is easier, faster, more reliable and cheap

This pattern has the following drawbacks:

  • Tests might pass but the application will fail in production

This pattern has the following issues:

  • How to ensure that the consumer provided tests match what the consumer actually requires?

See also


pattern  


Copyright © 2024 Chris Richardson • All rights reserved • Supported by Kong.

About Microservices.io

Microservices.io is brought to you by Chris Richardson. Experienced software architect, author of POJOs in Action, the creator of the original CloudFoundry.com, and the author of Microservices patterns.

Upcoming public workshops: Microservices and architecting for fast flow

In-person: Berlin and Milan

DevOps and Team topologies are vital for delivering the fast flow of changes that modern businesses need.

But they are insufficient. You also need an application architecture that supports fast, sustainable flow.

Learn more and register for one of my upcoming public workshops in November.

NEED HELP?

I help organizations improve agility and competitiveness through better software architecture.

Learn more about my consulting engagements, and training workshops.

LEARN about microservices

Chris offers numerous other resources for learning the microservice architecture.

Get the book: Microservices Patterns

Read Chris Richardson's book:

Example microservices applications

Want to see an example? Check out Chris Richardson's example applications. See code

Virtual bootcamp: Distributed data patterns in a microservice architecture

My virtual bootcamp, distributed data patterns in a microservice architecture, is now open for enrollment!

It covers the key distributed data management patterns including Saga, API Composition, and CQRS.

It consists of video lectures, code labs, and a weekly ask-me-anything video conference repeated in multiple timezones.

The regular price is $395/person but use coupon CCMHVSFB to sign up for $95 (valid until November 8th, 2024). There are deeper discounts for buying multiple seats.

Learn more

Learn how to create a service template and microservice chassis

Take a look at my Manning LiveProject that teaches you how to develop a service template and microservice chassis.

Signup for the newsletter


BUILD microservices

Ready to start using the microservice architecture?

Consulting services

Engage Chris to create a microservices adoption roadmap and help you define your microservice architecture,


The Eventuate platform

Use the Eventuate.io platform to tackle distributed data management challenges in your microservices architecture.

Eventuate is Chris's latest startup. It makes it easy to use the Saga pattern to manage transactions and the CQRS pattern to implement queries.


Join the microservices google group