Part 3. Closing the Loop

Now that you have the full breadth of mountebank functionality under your belt, part 3 puts its usage in context.

Service virtualization is a powerful tool, but, like any tool, it has its limits. In chapter 9, we explore it in the context of continuous delivery. We’ll build a test pipeline from start to finish for some of the microservices we’ve looked at previously in this book and discuss where service virtualization fits and where it doesn’t. We’ll also look at how to gain additional confidence in your test suite with contract tests that give you lightweight validation that play together well with your services without going down the path toward full end-to-end testing.

We close out the book by looking at performance testing, always a difficult subject and one made even more so by microservices. The need to understand your service’s performance characteristics in a networked environment is challenged by the cost and complexity of securing an end-to-end environment for testing. Service virtualization is a natural fit for performance testing and combines many of the features we’ve looked at previously, including proxies and behaviors.