Smart API sandboxes: why? what? how?

Traditional API sandboxes promise freedom for developers, testers, and partners to safely experiment with your APIs — but too often they fall short. They become outdated, are expensive to run and maintain, and fail to reflect real-world behavior.

In this session, you’ll learn how to build smart, cost-effective API sandboxes using Microcks — a CNCF project designed for mocking and testing API and event-driven architectures. We’ll explore what makes a “smart” sandbox different. Next, we’ll show you how Microcks uses your existing API specs and examples to generate realistic mocks and conformance tests - thanks to AI but not only ;-)

Through live demos and practical examples, we’ll demonstrate how to integrate these sandboxes with developers’ local environments, CI/CD pipelines, and Kubernetes clusters — and how to plug them into your observability stack for better insights. By the end, you’ll know how to deliver always up-to-date, lightweight, on-demand sandboxes that boost developer experience and reduce maintenance headaches

Takeaways:

• Understand the limitations of traditional API sandboxes and how to overcome them
• Get practical steps to design, deploy, and scale smart sandboxes with Microcks
• See how to integrate sandboxes into modern DevOps workflows

Audience:
This talk is designed for API and Events developers, architects, and DevOps engineers - more broadly, anyone interested in improving API quality, speed and collaboration