Testing Microservices with Mountebank

Preface

Pete Hodgson used to joke that building your own mocking framework was a rite of passage for ThoughtWorks developers. Those days are past, not because ThoughtWorks doesn’t care about testing anymore (we do, very much), but because the tooling around testing is a lot better, and because we have more interesting problems to focus on nowadays. In the winter of 2014, I had a testing problem, and it turns out that not being able to test prevents you from focusing on those more interesting problems.

We had adopted a microservices architecture but were limited by some of the legacy service code we were strangling out. The idea of service virtualization—using tests to mock up downstream network dependencies—was not new to us, even if the term ...