[SR2Z]

It's bizarre to me that we live in a world where whole machines and their networking stack can be spun up and virtualized and yet integration testing STILL actually has to go out and touch a real resource running on a different machine.

Yeah, obviously this isn't gonna work for embedded development, but not that many people have that specific problem. Is it really so hard to spin up ephemeral testing clusters on a single machine? Everywhere that I've seen it done, it's a horrible kludge of scripts and hacks that's almost as difficult to understand as the code under test.

[zanecodes]

Docker has made this much much easier than it used to be, and the ease of publishing images has led to many SaaS companies providing "dockerized" versions of their services.

I write a lot of Terraform to manage internal infrastructure with dependencies on other internal and external infrastructure that's outside of my control. I define a module parameter for each dependency (usually with a default value that points to the real service URL) and then create a second module that uses Docker to spin up and configure local instances of each dependency and overrides the corresponding parameter.

This makes local testing very straightforward: `terraform -chdir=tests apply`

[BobbyTables2]

At some point, it becomes hard to assert “we are NOT going to test the product the way a customer would actually use it”