Welcome to the first edition of the Cloud Native Testing Podcast for 2026! In this episode, host Ole Lensmar is joined by Yacine Kheddache to dive deep into Microcks, a CNCF Sandbox project dedicated to API mocking and simulation.

As cloud-native architectures grow more complex, the need to decouple services during development is critical. Yacine explains how Microcks serves as a "Swiss Army Knife" for developers, offering a single solution to mock and test REST, gRPC, GraphQL, and Event-Driven protocols (like Kafka and NATS). They discuss the tool's evolution from a centralized Kubernetes operator to a developer-friendly utility that runs natively in IDEs and pipelines, enabling true "shift left" testing.

Later in the conversation, they explore the intersection of API testing and Artificial Intelligence. Yacine details how Microcks is embracing the AI era by using Copilots to generate mock data and leveraging the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to make existing APIs accessible to LLMs.

Key Topics Discussed:

• The CNCF Journey: Microcks’ status as a community-driven Sandbox project.
• Polyglot Support: Mocking REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and AsyncAPI with one tool.
• The Testing Lifecycle: How to reuse mock data artifacts for automated contract and conformance testing in CI/CD.
• Shift Left: Moving testing from QA environments to local developer laptops and IDEs.
• AI & MCP: Generating datasets with AI and exposing APIs as tools for AI Agents using the Model Context Protocol.