Explore contract testing tools, service registration tools (eg CloudMap), and you'll find everything in between: proper registration allows simple testing of li

Explore contract testing tools, service registration tools (eg CloudMap), and you'll find everything in between: proper registration allows simple testing of live, non-production combinations of services, yet contract testing allows point-in-time commitments created from real services to replace your hand-crafted fakes/mocks. Still, I believe the ideal is to provide fast testing "stubs" along with actual services (so they can share interface and validation code, ensuring they never go out of sync) is the way to go, along with a small number of end-to-end tests running against integration/staging and production environments.