Keep Development Aligned with Blackbird in your CI/CD Pipeline

The text discusses the use of Ambassador Blackbird, a tool that helps maintain alignment between different parts of an application during development. It explains how modern applications often have complex frontends and backends interacting through APIs, which can be challenging to manage when multiple teams are involved in their development. OpenAPI is introduced as a standardized language for defining API contracts, but the text emphasizes that more is needed to keep everyone aligned as projects evolve. Drift from the agreed-upon contract can occur during development, leading to wasted effort and rework. To avoid this, Blackbird provides capabilities such as storing OpenAPI specs, generating mocks and code, and deploying implemented code in a hosted environment. The text then demonstrates how to use Blackbird in a CI/CD pipeline to keep a running mock up-to-date with changes made to the API spec. The process involves creating an account on Blackbird, uploading the OpenAPI spec, and noting down the download information for the Blackbird CLI. The text also discusses how mocks can be used in development to allow work to begin before dependent APIs are implemented, enabling parallel development and testing of solutions. The author then provides a step-by-step guide on setting up a GitHub Action that updates the API spec and mock in Blackbird whenever changes are merged or pushed to main. The example demonstrates how to create a user service OpenAPI spec, upload it to Blackbird, set up the CI/CD pipeline, and test the initial and updated mocks. In conclusion, the text highlights that Blackbird can help keep contracts aligned during development by maintaining synchronization between API specifications, mocks, code, and deployments.