Seamless End-to-End Testing With IBM API Connect and WireMock Cloud

Almost every developer, everywhere has one thing in common - they deal with APIs day in and day out.

Tools like IBM API Connect exist to help make this pile of internal and external APIs easier to manage, organize, secure and validate internally. They can be a critical part of API management for enterprise teams. 

But, there are some things API management tools don’t help with, mostly because they take over after the critical early phases of new features and new integrations work:

• They don’t help with service isolation for load testing, which means many teams just don’t do much load testing.
  
  
• They don’t easily enable chaos testing early in the API lifecycle, helping to prevent issues from ever occurring in production. 
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• Critically - they can’t help you prototype new APIs faster to get teams working in parallel. 

These are all the things WireMock Cloud and our realistic, stateful, dynamic API mocks exist to do.

The good news is IBM API Connect and WireMock Cloud work together (some would even say they are meant to work together) in one perfect workflow - rapidly prototype a new API in WireMock Cloud, designing your important happy-path scenarios and then push the spec via Git easily into IBM API connect so that teams at all times easily have access to consume the validated new API mock.

By adding WireMock Cloud for early-stage API prototyping to your IBM API Connect internal processes, engineering teams will be attacking the root causes of slow delivery and quality issues: Blocked developers, poor test environments, an inability to easily replicate production scenarios and APIs evolving late in the development process. Ultimately, this kind of workflow hits the metrics that teams care most about - velocity, cost, and production issues. 

Why Integrate IBM API Connect with WireMock Cloud Now?

One question we get often is when should teams address the problems in their SDLC that WireMock Cloud uniquely solves. In the case the answer is easy - if you’re using IBM API Connect, you’re more than ready to simplify your SDLC with WireMock Cloud.

While adding tools to your processes often times adds complexity, we find again and again that a combined workflow of API Management with IBM API Connect and real-world API prototyping and mocking with WireMock Cloud does the opposite. You will free developers up from cumbersome work - both at the beginning and the end of your feature development cycle - almost immediately. 

For engineering leaders, you should be considering this workflow if you often have developers waiting around for APIs to be ready, leading to a lack of consistent parallelized development. Or, if you see teams spending time troubleshooting problems caused by flakey or unreliable 3rd party APIs that too often don’t get caught in the test stages of your process. 

These sorts of problems block developers, or pull them off the critical, value-creating work, and so introducing WireMock Cloud on top of IBM API Connect will give you time back that you can’t afford to waste.

Integrating WireMock Cloud and IBM API Connect couldn’t be easier.

Step 1: Setting Up WireMock Cloud

• Create a WireMock Cloud Account: Sign up for an account on the WireMock Cloud platform. It’s free!
  
  
• Create a Mock API: Define the endpoints and responses you need for your tests. For instance, let’s say your team is designing a new API for a service that will provide coffee details to ecommerce platforms. Of course, you can design whatever API you need, and with test data sources, stateful mocking, response matching and more WireMock can simulate - and help you design - complex, real world APIs easily.

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• WireMock will automatically create an OpenAPI spec based on the API mocks you design, and will keep that spec up to date as you continue to evolve your API mocks
• Enable Git sync: With the proposed new API spec drafted, and a mock server running ready for teams to get to work consuming it - we’ll push the spec into Git, which will allow IBM API Connect to pick it up.

Step 2: Importing your mock server details into IBM API Connect

• Import OpenAPI specification: Import the OpenAPI specification generated by WireMock Cloud into IBM API Connect. This will allow API Connect to understand the mock API’s structure and endpoints. You’ll need to make the Git containing the OpenAPI spec a known Source.
  

• ‍Create A New API - Using the “From A Target Source” option, create a new API inside of IBM API Connect.‍

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• Specify the OpenAPI Spec in Git as the source: In IBM API Connect, configure the connection details to point to the WireMock Cloud endpoints. Use the URLs provided by WireMock Cloud for the mock services.
  
  
• Use the new, integrated mock API to test negative scenarios, verify robustness, simulate chaos, and perform easy contract testing.
  
  
• That’s it! Your new API - and any changes you make to the spec or mock server going forward - will automatically be available inside of IBM API Connect, ready to be consumed by your entire team and enabled for the wide range of testing, security and validation workflows that API Connect easily enabled.

Improve Your API Work with WireMock Cloud

Integrating WireMock Cloud with IBM API Connect provides a workflow that spans your SDLC - from the moment you need a new API, to integrate an external API for the first time - all the way into production. It will enable faster feedback, better quality and less time with idle devs waiting for API changes or API details to become available.

Try it today.

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