Free service virtualization, sounds great! Whenever you hear free, should get nervous, I know that I do. After I wrote this title I looked at it and immediately hated it. But here’s the thing – at my day job at Parasoft we’ve just taken one of our really great products, Parasoft Virtualize, and made a free “community edition” version of it.
So who needs this and why should you care about it? Well software applications have gotten a lot more complex in the last decade. Time was you had a simple monolithic desktop application and that’s all you had to worry about. Some of them had a little connectivity, like to a database or maybe simple external dependencies, 
but mostly they stood on their own. Today’s “applications” look more like systems or even systems-of-systems. It’s not uncommon to have a relatively small core application but surrounded by a plethora of dependencies like databases, cloud APIs to provide data, shipping services, payment services and even connections to physical devices in the real world – the Internet of Things or IoT.
That’s where the “service virtualization” technology comes in. I know, I know, it’s a horrible name and it’s already caused you to think it’s something other than what it is. Nothing I can do about it, that name is in use by the analysts and I have no control over it. I think of it more like “communication emulation” in that it emulates the communication. Think of it this way, instead of APIs linked into an application as part of the compilation processed, we now have services that are accessed live dynamically – meaning we talk to them and they talk to us. Even in the IoT world of SmartHome or SmartFactory or SmartCity it’s all about pieces talking to each other. This gives as remote info, remote control, and even some degree of autonomous decision making – like the NEST thermostat. Initially I used the app to control the thermostat to my liking, now it just figures out what I was doing and mostly does it for me.
Testing these kinds of systems is a huge pain. You need a test lab that has one of everything you’re connecting to. If you’re updating some of them, then you need a lab with the old one AND the new one – like a new version of Oracle or MySQL. Setting up the lab costs time and money, and then I have to fight with other teams to use it. Service Virtualization let’s me make fake (virtual) versions of the things I depend on, and then use them to test instead of needing the real thing.
This not only makes it faster/easier/cheaper to test, but it frees IT to do other important things. Plus I can make these virtual things behave how I want them to – if I want them to flood the network, they will. If I want them to be fast or slow to respond, I can do that. If I want one of them to be a bad actor and pretend it’s been compromised, no problem. My testing will be more thorough in addition to easier.
Once you realize that service virtualization technology is for you, the next step is to choose a tool. Lot’s of people instantly go check open-source, because of course it “doesn’t cost anything”. I’ve done a pretty thorough check of all open-source SV tools and at the moment they’re only really useful if your whole world is centered in http/https. Even then there are lots of other features like using a UI to create, manage, and deploy the virtual assets. So now that Parasoft created a free version, why not see what commerical software offers you? You can download it here.
Try it, you’ll like it.