A Typo Led to the Creation of Spring Cloud Contract • Marcin Grzejszczak & Jakub Pilimon • GOTO 2026

Marcin Grzejszczak, Java Champion and long-time Spring contributor, shares the origin story of Spring Cloud Contract (originally called Acurest): a typo fix in a microservice API broke production because no clients were notified, exposing the need for consumer-driven contract testing. He explains how contract tests catch breaking API changes automatically, why teams often abandon them (the 'contract champion' problem), and a forward-looking idea to use AI to auto-generate contracts from captured production traffic and validate them against OpenAPI specs. He also discusses his work on the Micrometer Observation API and argues that the missing piece in observability beyond logs/metrics/traces is business and technical context.