I should also probably add that introspec opens up a lot of interesting possibilities for us which are on our todo list.
the servicecop itself will run as a service which we could use during design or build time to automatically block breaking changes from being deployed without explicit authorisaton.
Another such possibility is a service which can use the spec to generate test DTO’s to submit against the services for both contract verification and load-testing.
Also on the todo list, is to add a “WhatIf” flag to our Discovery plugin that combined with some trickery can fake execution of not only the request method, but any of it’s downstream Gateway calls and generate execution maps, coupled with our correlation plugin, we can also use this for creating timing sequence diagrams (ala chrome tools)
there’s a ton more things we have in store but we see a lot of value in this approach.
Oh and I forgot the main course. The DocIt site which is another on our roadmap. From our spec we are going to create a documentation site (think SwaggerUI type thing). Combining this with a custom consul gateway, we can aggregate the specs from all services into one place.
The fact that we can convert the spec into Postman and RAML (and potentially more formats) also means that we can generate http request code samples using existing tooling libraries in a ton of different languages.
And for the finale, given that the doc site is a servicestack site (albeit with with a custom metadata plugin that hooks into our gateway) it can be used as a single servicestack reference url in our projects. We combine this with the include filtering that we PR’d and it means that we can offer consumers a basket style of picking DTO’s to add as a service reference at design time.