VMblog recently had the opportunity to speak with Alon Girmonsky, the Co-Founder and CEO of UP9 to learn more about the company and their recent acquisition of MockLab.

VMblog:  Can you kick things off for VMblog readers by first explaining what UP9 does?

Alon Girmonsky:  UP9 enables Kubernetes developers to ensure their APIs perform reliably and securely, and that they are production-ready. By unpacking API protocols like Kafka, REST, gRPC, Redis and RabbitMQ, and continuously monitoring the API payload, UP9 detects API regressions and prevents security vulnerabilities from drifting into production.

Organizations allocate huge budgets to detect API regressions and security vulnerabilities in production, with the risk of them already having an adverse impact on the business, while these API regressions and security vulnerabilities can be prevented before they reach production. Using UP9 can result in shorter release cycles, improved developers' productivity on top of higher software reliability. 

VMblog:  What is the problem that UP9 solves?

Girmonsky:  APIs are critical to all organizations that rely on software to run their business. API regressions and security vulnerabilities adversely impact the business if they reach production, consume precious developers' time, and slow down releases.

VMblog:  Congratulations on UP9's recent acquisition of MockLab.  Can you tell us more about it?

Girmonsky:  MockLab is the creator of WireMock, the popular open source project for API mocking. WireMock, which was downloaded more than 13,000,000 times in 2021 alone, is very popular amongst developers around the world that use the open source project to simulate the interfaces to external systems in order to support testing, troubleshooting and prototyping without having to depend on the real thing. The open source project is used in numerous organizations, from small startups all the way up to the world's largest banks.

Building and maintaining API mocks by hand in complex environments can be very time consuming. UP9, which already improves developers' productivity and saves them precious time with its automatic API test builder, can now also autogenerate API mocks in WireMock, saving effort and ensuring that they remain current and correct.

VMblog:  And finally, can you speak to UP9's competitive landscape and how UP9 differentiates itself?

Girmonsky:  UP9 provides modern and alternative ways to prevent API regressions and security vulnerabilities from reaching production, replacing traditional API testing and monitoring vendors such as Tricentis, SmartBear and MicroFocus. 

Traditional API testing platforms rely on people to generate and maintain tests, which are  time-consuming tasks. It gets exponentially more complex with applications that are built atop Kubernetes.

UP9 is a fully automated solution that is built for Kubernetes applications. Instead of relying on people, UP9 analyses the API traffic between microservices, and as a result autogenerates codified test-cases, and now also API mocks giving developers precious time back.

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