As Microservices and APIs become more prevalent in modern software development, testing and validating these APIs is increasingly important to ensure the quality of your software.
Testing APIs and microservices offer a host of benefits. First, they allow you to easily test end-to-end behavior, without having to invest in writing and maintaining UI based testing, by mimicking the API calls clients would generate. This allows for stable and easy-to-write tests and can help identify exactly where in your system problems originate. API tests can also be easily run as monitors, allowing you to easily identify outages and performance degradations before your users do! However, unlike more common classes of tests like end-to-end testing and unit testing, API testing is a newer field for many engineering teams. To that end, this article will help you get started with testing your APIs.