The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept Microcks as a CNCF incubating project.
About Microcks
Modern software teams build applications as collections of interconnected APIs and microservices, and with that architecture comes a significant challenge: how do you develop and test services in isolation when so many depend on each other? Microcks solves this by providing an open source, cloud native platform for API mocking and testing.
With Microcks, teams can instantly turn their existing API contract documents, whether they’re OpenAPI specs, AsyncAPI specs, gRPC/Protobuf definitions, GraphQL schemas, Postman collections, or SOAP/WSDL projects, into live mock servers. Those same assets then power automated contract conformance tests against real implementations. The result is a unified, multi-protocol approach that spans both synchronous REST/RPC APIs and event-driven, asynchronous architectures — a combination that sets Microcks apart from narrower tooling.
Microcks’s key milestones and ecosystem development
Created in February 2015 by Laurent Broudoux, Microcks is a community-driven project with global contributors and adopters, including financial institutions (BNP Paribas, Société Générale, and Lombard Odier) and technology/consulting firms (Deloitte, Amway, and J.B. Hunt).
Since joining the CNCF Sandbox on June 22, 2023, Microcks has seen significant growth in adoption, contribution, development, and ecosystem reach.
Adoption has surged, with container image downloads exceeding 2.5 million in 2025 (triple the 2024 total). Over 34 organizations publicly adopt Microcks, with 13 added in 2025 alone. The project has high community interest, evidenced by 1,800 GitHub stars and 311 forks on the main repository, plus consistent documentation traffic growth.
The contributor base is expanding, totaling 645 across GitHub. The last quarter saw 51 active contributors with an “Excellent” 57% quarter-over-quarter retention rate. In 2025, 167 active contributors represented 35 organizations. Maintainers now include code owners from Yosemite Crew and AXA France, signaling growing community ownership.
Development health is strong: the project was active 342 of the last 365 days. The 12-month average is 288 new pull requests monthly, with an average issue resolution time of 11 days and PR merge lead time of 6 days. The core platform has had 19 releases, with the current stable version being 1.14.0.
Post-sandbox, Microcks has deepened integrations with CNCF projects like Dapr, OpenTelemetry, Keycloak, and AsyncAPI (The Linux Foundation). It integrates natively with Kubernetes and Helm for deployment and connects to CI/CD via Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and Tekton. Testcontainers modules for Java, Node.js, Go, Python, and .NET allow developers to embed Microcks in local test loops.
A word from the Maintainers
“When we first started Microcks ten years ago, the idea was simple: developers should be able to simulate any API dependency, regardless of protocol, without writing a single line of custom code. What we didn’t anticipate was how central that problem would become as the industry shifted to microservices, event-driven architectures, and now AI-powered APIs. Reaching CNCF incubation is a validation not just of the technology, but of the community that has shaped it; 645 contributors, 34 public adopters, and organizations are contributing back because they genuinely depend on the project. We’re grateful to CNCF for the neutral, collaborative home it provides, and we’re energized by what’s ahead: deeper AsyncAPI toolchain integration, AI and MCP simulation support, and continuing to make multi-protocol API testing effortless for every team that builds on Kubernetes.”
— Laurent Broudoux, Creator and Maintainer, Microcks
“The ‘better together’ principle has defined how we’ve built Microcks from the start, with a vendor-neutral design, integrated tools that developers already use, and shaped it by the organizations actually running it in production. In 2025 alone, more than 13 organizations joined our public adopters list, and we saw over 2.5 million container image downloads. That growth isn’t just a number: it reflects teams in financial services, cloud platforms, and enterprise software trusting Microcks at the center of their API DevOps workflows. CNCF incubation gives us the governance foundation and community reach to keep building in the open. The next chapter, including intelligent mocking for AI agents, MCP protocol support, and making contract testing a first-class citizen in every CI/CD pipeline, is one we’re excited to write alongside the community.”
— Yacine Kheddache, Maintainer and Community Lead, Microcks
Support from the TOC
The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) provides technical leadership to the cloud native community. It defines and maintains the foundation’s technical vision, approves new projects, and stewards them across maturity levels. The TOC also aligns projects within the overall ecosystem, sets cross-cutting standards and best practices, and works with end users to ensure long-term sustainability. As part of its charter, the TOC evaluates and supports projects as they meet the requirements for incubation and continue progressing toward graduation.
“Microcks addresses a gap that any team building distributed systems on Kubernetes will recognize immediately: the difficulty of developing and testing services in isolation when everything depends on everything else. Across adopters, Microcks has consistently proven itself as the only open source solution capable of addressing API mocking at scale across multiple specifications, such as REST, GraphQL, AsyncAPI, and gRPC, natively on Kubernetes and without vendor lock-in. Microcks demonstrates the kind of engaged, sustainable community that CNCF incubation is designed to support. I look forward to seeing the project continue to grow within the ecosystem.”
— Katie Gamanji, CNCF TOC Sponsor
Main components
Microcks is composed of several modular components:
- Core Server: The main Microcks application, built with Java/Spring Boot, providing the API mocking engine, web UI, and REST API. It ingests API contract documents and serves dynamic mock responses.
- Async Minion: A lightweight companion service handling event-driven and asynchronous protocols (Apache Kafka, MQTT, AMQP, WebSocket, Google Pub/Sub, and more), extending mocking beyond HTTP.
- Operator: A Kubernetes Operator for lifecycle management and automated deployment of Microcks instances in Kubernetes environments, as well as full GitOps support for deploying mocks and executing tests.
- Helm Chart: A production-grade Helm chart for flexible, configurable Kubernetes deployments.
- Testcontainers Libraries: Community-maintained modules for Java, Node.js, Go, Python, and .NET that let developers embed Microcks directly in automated tests.
- CLI: A command-line tool for triggering API conformance tests from CI/CD pipelines, with integrations for Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Tekton, and others.
Project roadmap
The Microcks team is focused on several key development areas to enhance the platform. A major theme is integrating with AI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), positioning Microcks as a crucial testing and simulation layer for AI-powered APIs and agents.
Microcks is also expanding its support for the AsyncAPI ecosystem, notably by incorporating Kafka contract testing into the acceptance testing infrastructure for the AsyncAPI Generator. Furthermore, the maintainers are committed to growing the Testcontainers ecosystem across more languages and frameworks.
Building on the 2025 OpenTelemetry integration, Microcks will feature continued observability enhancements. Finally, future work includes adding support for more event-driven protocols and advancing the JavaScript dispatcher to enable more dynamic and complex mocking scenarios.
The full project roadmap is maintained at https://github.com/orgs/microcks/projects/1.
As a CNCF-hosted project, Microcks is part of a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community outreach. Microcks joins incubating technologies that standardize cloud native infrastructure, enhance observability, and streamline service-to-service communication. For more information on maturity requirements for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.
To learn more about Microcks, visit microcks.io, explore the GitHub repository, or join the community on Discord.