The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has officially voted to advance Microcks to CNCF incubating project status.
Introducing Microcks
Today’s development teams increasingly build software as a network of loosely coupled APIs and microservices—but this architecture introduces a major hurdle: how do you develop and test a single service in isolation when it relies on dozens of others? Microcks tackles this problem head-on with an open source, cloud native solution for API simulation and contract testing.
With Microcks, you can instantly spin up working mock servers from your existing API contract documents—whether those are OpenAPI or AsyncAPI specs, gRPC/Protobuf definitions, GraphQL schemas, Postman collections, or even legacy SOAP/WSDL files. Those same contracts are then used to automatically verify that your real implementations behave as expected. This unified, multi-protocol approach covers both synchronous REST/RPC-style APIs and asynchronous, event-driven systems—a breadth that distinguishes Microcks from more narrowly scoped tools.
Key Milestones & Ecosystem Growth
Founded in February 2015 by Laurent Broudoux, Microcks has grown into a globally supported, community-driven initiative with active contributors and enterprise adopters spanning financial institutions (BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Lombard Odier) and technology firms (Deloitte, Amway, J.B. Hunt).
Since entering the CNCF Sandbox in June 2023, the project has experienced remarkable momentum across adoption, contributions, development velocity, and ecosystem integration:
- Adoption has accelerated sharply—container image downloads surpassed 2.5 million in 2025, tripling the 2024 figure. Over 34 organizations publicly use Microcks, with 13 joining in just the past year.
- Community interest remains strong, with 1,800+ GitHub stars and 311 forks, alongside steadily increasing documentation traffic.
- The contributor community continues to diversify, now totaling 645 contributors across GitHub. In the most recent quarter, 51 individuals actively contributed, showing an impressive 57% quarter-over-quarter retention rate. In 2025 alone, 167 contributors represented 35 organizations. Maintainer ownership has expanded to include code leads from Yosemite Crew and AXA France, reflecting broader governance.
- Development pace is robust: the project was active on 342 of the last 365 days, averaging 288 new pull requests per month over the past year. Issues are resolved in about 11 days on average, with PRs merged in roughly 6 days. The core platform has delivered 19 stable releases, currently at version 1.14.0.
- Ecosystem integration has deepened significantly: Microcks now connects natively with CNCF projects such as Dapr, OpenTelemetry, Keycloak, and AsyncAPI (Linux Foundation). It deploys seamlessly on Kubernetes via Helm charts and integrates into CI/CD workflows through Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and Tekton. Dedicated Testcontainers modules for Java, Node.js, Go, Python, and .NET enable developers to run Microcks directly within local test environments.
Words from the Maintainers
“A decade ago when we began Microcks, our goal was straightforward: let developers simulate any API dependency, regardless of protocol, without writing any custom code. What we didn’t foresee was how critical this would become as the industry embraced microservices, event-driven architectures, and now AI-driven APIs. Achieving CNCF incubation validates not only the technology but also the vibrant community behind it—645 contributors, 34 public adopters, and enterprises actively giving back because their workflows depend on this tool. We’re thankful to CNCF for offering a neutral, collaborative home, and we’re energized for what’s next: tighter AsyncAPI integration, support for AI and MCP-based simulation, and making multi-protocol API testing seamless for every Kubernetes-based team.”
— Laurent Broudoux, Creator and Lead Maintainer, Microcks
From day one, Microcks has embodied the ‘better together’ ethos—designed to work with the tools developers already rely on, shaped by real-world production use, and maintained without vendor bias. In 2025 alone, over 13 organizations joined our public adopters list, and downloads exceeded 2.5 million. This growth isn’t just a metric—it demonstrates trust from financial institutions, cloud platforms, and enterprises putting Microcks at the heart of their API DevOps pipelines. CNCF incubation gives us the governance structure and reach to keep innovating openly. Up next: smarter mocking for AI agents, full MCP protocol support, and making contract testing a standard part of every CI/CD process—all built hand-in-hand with the community.”
— Yacine Kheddache, Maintainer & Community Lead, Microcks
Endorsement from the CNCF TOC
The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) provides strategic technical direction for the cloud native ecosystem. It shapes and upholds the foundation’s technical vision, approves new projects, and guides them through maturity stages. The TOC ensures alignment across the project portfolio, promotes cross-cutting standards and best practices, and partners with end users to ensure long-term project health. As part of this role, it evaluates and champions projects as they meet incubation requirements and progress toward graduation.
“The challenge Microcks solves is instantly relatable to anyone building distributed systems on Kubernetes: how do you develop and test services independently when everything relies on everything else? Across its user base, Microcks has proven itself as the only open source solution capable of scaling API mocking across multiple specifications—REST, GraphQL, AsyncAPI, and gRPC—natively on Kubernetes, with no vendor lock-in. It also exemplifies the kind of engaged, sustainable community that CNCF incubation is designed to nurture. I’m excited to see Microcks continue to grow within the ecosystem.”
— Katie Gamanji, CNCF TOC Sponsor
Core Components
Microcks is built from a set of modular, complementary components:
- Core Server: The central Microcks engine, built on Java/Spring Boot. It hosts the web UI and REST API, ingests API contracts, and serves dynamic mock responses.
- Async Minion: A lightweight companion service that extends mocking to asynchronous protocols like Apache Kafka, MQTT, AMQP, WebSocket, Google Pub/Sub, and other event-driven systems.
- Operator: A Kubernetes Operator for lifecycle management and fully automated deployment of Microcks instances, including native GitOps workflows for launching mocks and running tests.
- Helm Chart: A production-ready Helm chart enabling flexible, configurable deployments on Kubernetes clusters.
- Testcontainers Libraries: Community-driven modules for Java, Node.js, Go, Python, and .NET that let teams run Microcks directly inside automated test suites.
- CLI: A command-line tool for triggering API conformance tests from CI/CD pipelines, with built-in support for Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Tekton, and more.
Future Roadmap
The Microcks team is focused on several strategic priorities to expand the platform’s capabilities. A major focus is integrating with AI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), positioning Microcks as a key testing and simulation layer for AI-powered APIs and intelligent agents.
The project is also broadening its AsyncAPI ecosystem support, including adding Kafka contract testing to the AsyncAPI Generator’s acceptance test suite. Additionally, maintainers are committed to expanding Testcontainers support across more languages and frameworks.
Building on the 2025 OpenTelemetry integration, Microcks will continue enhancing observability features. Future work also includes adding support for additional event-driven protocols and advancing the JavaScript dispatcher to enable more sophisticated, dynamic mocking scenarios.
The full project roadmap is maintained at [roadmap link].
As a CNCF-hosted project, Microcks benefits from a neutral foundation aligned with its technical goals, backed by the broader Linux Foundation’s governance, marketing, and community outreach. It joins other incubating technologies focused on standardizing cloud native infrastructure, improving observability, and simplifying service-to-service communication. For details on maturity requirements at each level, visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.
To get started with Microcks, visit microcks.io, explore the GitHub repository, or connect with the community on Discord.
