Self-service service virtualization tool for platform engineering product teams

As Thoughtworks have observed, platform engineering product teams are a sensible default to delivering results to customers in competitive fast-paced environments.

"The emphasis here is on API-driven self-service and supporting tools, with delivery teams still responsible for supporting what they deploy onto the platform. Organizations that consider establishing such a platform team should be very cautious not to accidentally create a separate DevOps team, nor should they simply relabel their existing hosting and operations structure as a platform."  - ThoughtWorks Technology Radar 2017 edition

Commercial tool Traffic Parrot and opensource tools like Wiremock or Mountebank are compatible with self-service teams where there is no centralised admin team managing the service virtualization and API mocking infrastructure. The cross-functional product teams manage Traffic Parrot instances and mocks themselves for their product needs.

As one of our customers put it back in 2017:

'We are building a new platform based on microservices and needed a testing infrastructure that allowed all of our testers to work autonomously, using local machines to record their communication streams between their services and inside our pipelines in order to virtualize a service. Traffic Parrot, while not as fully featured as offerings from HP and IBM, offered the key capabilities that our teams needed such as HTTPS and JMS IBM MQ and a substantially smaller footprint that allowed it to run locally. We have been very pleased by Traffic Parrot's email support and responsiveness to our requests and would recommend them to other teams doing microservice-based architectures." - Chief Architect at a Fortune 500 company

And another team that migrated off a centrally managed solution:

"We have migrated our department off CA Lisa to reduce our operational costs in performance and system testing environments. We used WireMock for HTTP stubbing and mocking and Traffic Parrot for IBM MQ. Neither WireMock nor Traffic Parrot provides all the features available in CA Lisa. Still, after initial proof of concept assessment, we have decided those tools' feature sets will be sufficient for our needs and significantly cut costs. It took our team six months to migrate HTTP to WireMock and another three months working closely with the Traffic Parrot team to improve their offering to meet our load testing and mainframe integration requirements. With this investment, we cut our tooling costs in half." - Executive working for a global retail bank.

If you currently use WireMock or Mountebank but need gRPC, JMS, ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, IBM® WebSphere MQ 7.5+, AMQP, or other protocol support, let’s schedule a 20-minute call to explore if Traffic Parrot is a better fit for your needs.