We had a customer recently who were quite interested in the idea of using Spring Cloud Contract (SCC) in order to prevent API ‘drift’ between microservices teams where individual development teams look after the individual API’s that form part of an enterprise application.
Spring Cloud Contract is an implementation of the ‘Consumer Driven Contracts‘ concept for the Spring platform. From the docs…
Spring Cloud Contract provides support for Consumer Driven Contracts and service schemas in Spring applications. [It provides] a range of options for writing tests, publishing assets, and asserting that a contract is kept by both producers and consumers. It works with both HTTP and message-based interactions.
To help the customer get started with SCC, I created a demonstration app for them that used the 1.0 GA version of the Ssoftware. During this process, I learned that SCC is undergoing some rapid development at the moment and this meant that SCC v1.0 was occasionally a little bit ‘temperamental’ when things like filenames or folder locations change within your project. I found first few days with SCC were a learning curve but I did come to love it as the results of my effort were paid off.
I found that Spring Cloud Contract publishes very clear and helpful information about your services, improves the clarity of your testing, adds fantastic wiremock stubbing capabilities, and alerts you early to any API drift which may have occurred between projects (which is essential in multi-team microservice development environments). I’ll definitely be recommending SCC to clients in the future.
To try and help other newbies out, I used the original SCC samples but added plenty of comments into the code and the README’s to make it easier for people to just pick it up and run with it.
The code for the demo is here: https://github.com/benwilcock/spring-cloud-contracts
Extra Credit – Spring Cloud Services on PCF
The same customer also wanted a demo of the Spring Cloud Services (SCS) components for Pivotal Cloud Foundry so I built one and added additional Zipkin tracing (not part of SCS) into the mix. This demo should make it super easy for anyone giving PCF and SCS a trial run. It should even work on PCF Dev (if started with the SCS services) so any Spring developer, even those without PCF access at work can still give it a try.
https://github.com/benwilcock/pcf-spring-cloud-services-demo
I enjoyed building them, and I hope that these are useful to you.
| Reference: | Spring Cloud Contracts and Spring Cloud Services on PCF from our JCG partner Ben Wilcock at the Ben Wilcock’s blog blog. |
