Simplifying Cloud Native App Testing across Environments with Dapr and Microcks

Running cloud native applications locally is challenging — especially when your app depends on multiple APIs, databases, or cloud services. Starting a new Spring Boot application is exciting, but ensuring it behaves the same on your laptop, in CI, and on Kubernetes can quickly become frustrating and time-consuming.

In this talk, we’ll show how to simplify testing complex Spring applications across environments using tools like Dapr and Microcks.

We’ll cover how to:

• Use Testcontainers to run real dependencies locally in containers.
• Mock and test API behaviors with Microcks to decouple teams and speed up integration testing.
• Leverage Dapr to abstract and standardize service-to-service communication, so your app runs the same way on your machine as it does in production, without needing a full Kubernetes cluster locally. Through live demos, you’ll see how these tools work together to streamline local development, enable repeatable tests, and reduce environment drift.

Takeaways:

• Strategies to run cloud native apps locally without heavyweight clusters.
• How Dapr helps you write portable, environment-agnostic services.
• Using Microcks to easily mock and validate API contracts.
• Practical patterns for Java developers building and testing microservices.

Audience:

This talk is designed for Java developers, cloud architects, and DevOps engineers working with Spring Boot and Kubernetes who want to improve productivity and testing confidence while reducing infrastructure overhead.