Signadot is a Kubernetes-native platform that accelerates the development of microservices based applications. It provides a fast feedback loop for microservices, and allows developers to test code changes in staging or production environments during the development process.
This is such a neat use case for Istio/sidecars/service mesh. If you can get in control of networking between services, you can really do amazing stuff. Is anyone trying this in their production cluster or is it all dev/staging for now?
Signadot abstracts away the complexity of setting up your service for testing, be it for local development or via CICD. As a developer working on a piece of business logic, you no longer need to even know how to run your service! You can use unit tests for part of local development and have Signadot run the service for you when it's time to test integrations & API, in the real environment. And it is fast, too. It is quite a shift in mentality, very much aligned with the general k8s & DevOps movements. We have been working on integration of Signadot at Upwork and we find it has great potential.
Signadot
Huge thanks to @garrytan and @ycombinator for the hunt! 🙏
👋 Hey Product Hunt Fam! I'm Arjun, co-founder of Signadot. Excited to introduce SmartTests—a new way to catch API breaking changes without maintaining traditional contracts!
📜 Why we built SmartTests
After talking to hundreds of engineering teams, we discovered something surprising: automated testing was an afterthought for most microservices teams.
Many had looked into contract testing but adoption was shockingly low. The problem? Traditional approaches put all the burden on developers—writing contracts, maintaining mocks, integrating with CI systems. Too much toil.
We decided to flip this: what if AI could handle the heavy lifting? SmartTests automatically detect breaking API changes by comparing real traffic—no contracts or mocks to maintain.
🧐 The problem with traditional contract testing
Current approaches create development friction:
- Manual contract maintenance that's time-consuming and goes stale quickly
- Mock-based testing that misses real-world issues
- Team coordination overhead that slows everyone down
🤯 How SmartTests work differently
SmartTests compare real API responses between your current and new code versions running side-by-side. AI-powered analysis spots only the changes that actually matter.
✅ Simple tests in Starlark - focus on critical API calls, not contract files
✅ Smart AI diffs - highlights meaningful changes, reduces noise
✅ Runs on Pull Requests - fast feedback before merging code
🥰 Try it out!
1. Sign up free - create your first SmartTest in under 2 minutes!
2. 20% off our Team plan for a whole year for PH users ❤️ - email us at info@signadot.com
What questions do you have about testing microservices? Would love to hear your thoughts!
@garrytan @ycombinator @arjuniyer The Starlark format is easy to read and quick to test.
How does SmartTests deal with dynamic fields like timestamps and session IDs in API responses?
Signadot
@masump I'm foxish, co-founder and CTO of Signadot. Thanks for the question! What we do is to learn from the traffic and classify the diffs we find based on their relevance (https://www.signadot.com/docs/concepts/smart-tests-and-jobs#smart-diff). The idea is that things like timestamps and session IDs change very often and independently of the test, so they quickly become "low relevance" findings.
CoLaunchly
Hey Arjun! SmartTests sounds like a game-changer for microservices teams. The burden of traditional contract testing definitely needs an innovative shake-up, and your AI-driven approach to reducing dev toil is very exciting. Kudos to you and the team for tackling this challenge! 🙌
Signadot
@alex_cloudstar appreciate your kind words. Would be great if you could sign up and give us your feedback thx
Exactly in microservices team, even automated testing often gets pushed aside because of how resource intensive it is. If Signadot can solve these kinds of problems, that would be amazing! Congrats on the launch!
Signadot
@kay_arkain couldn’t agree more! Would be great if you could try SmartTests and give us your thoughts. Thanks