Consumer Driven Contracts and Your Microservice Architecture

SpringOne Platform 2016 Speaker: Marcin Grzejszczak; Principal Software Engineer, Pivotal TDD introduced many improvements into the development process, but in our opinion the biggest impact relates to code design. Looking at the code from the usage perspective (by first writing an acceptance test) allows us to focus on usability rather than concrete implementation. Unfortunately, we usually rest on our laurels not trying to uplift this practice to the architecture level. Consumer driven contracts (CDC) are like TDD applied to the API. It’s especially important in the world of microservices. Since it’s driven by consumers, it’s much more user friendly. Of course microservices are really cool, but most people do not take into consideration plenty of potential obstacles that should be tackled. Then instead of frequent, fully automated deploys via a delivery pipeline, you might end up in an asylum due to frequent mental breakdowns caused by production disasters. This presentation will show you how you can use the Spring Cloud Contract Verifier functionality in order to have a fully automated solution to stub your HTTP / Messaging collaborators. Just by adding proper configuration you'll be able to have all of your microservices surrounding world faked with stubs that were tested against their producer. We will write a system using the CDC approach together with spring boot, spring cloud and spring cloud contract verifier. I'll show you how easy it is to write applications that have a consumer driven API and that will allow a developer to speed up the time of writing his better quality software.