Best practices designing sandbox for REST api

Question

We are developing some REST api's for internal use. To test these microservices we are toying with the idea that every service has a sandbox mode so we can do integration tests that are as close as possible to the real deal.

To see if this path is worth trying we are looking for documentation / best practices on how to manage this sandbox and how to implement this internally. When we look for the keywords Sandbox, REST API and Best Practices we only find how to implement as consumer of existing sandboxes.

So does anyone have some documentation / links in how to tackle this problem and what the pro's and con's are of the different ways?

Kr,

Thomas

Answer 1

I'd say there are two ways to proceed:

1. Basic: keep a separate sandbox instance of a service. You always deploy a new code to this instance first and run automated/manual tests to verify if everything works fine. A datastore could be a snapshot from the production data or artificial testing data. I would rather we have a "Snapshot" but it depends whether it is applicable in your particular case (privacy etc.)
2. Advanced: I spied this technique on Facebook Marketing API. This API provides an interface to set up and launch advertising campaigns. They didn't provide a sandbox api for testing purposes (at least last year when the system I was working on had been integrating with Facebook). However if you use a keyword "test" in a name of a campaign or an adset (key entities in the ad world) they would never launch and spend your money. You can try extend this concept on your particular domain and run tests on (or very close to) your production

Hope this helps