Adding semi-automated tests of a microservice landscape

Being able to automatically run unit and integration tests for each microservice in isolation using plain Java, JUnit, and Gradle is very useful during development, but insufficient when we move over to the operation side. In operation, we also need a way to automatically verify that a system landscape of cooperating microservices delivers what we expect. Being able to, at any time, run a script that verifies that a number of cooperating microservices all work as expected in operation is very valuable – the more microservices there are, the higher the value of such a verification script.

For this reason, I have written a simple bash script that can verify the functionality of a deployed system landscape by performing calls to the RESTful APIs exposed by the microservices. It is based on the curl commands we learned about and used above. The script verifies return codes and parts of the JSON responses using jq. The...