They're not necessarily brittle but I know what you mean. When the integration tests reach across multiple services then things tend to get brittle but this can

They're not necessarily brittle but I know what you mean. When the integration tests reach across multiple services then things tend to get brittle but this can be fixed by stubbing out the external services. Stubs are not just useful for unit tests. Service stubs are often much easier to write than module stubs because services often communicate via string based protocols which are easy to simulate.