# Introduction ## What is Hoverfly Cloud? Hoverfly Cloud is a Software-as-a-Service API simulation solution, designed from the ground up for integration, automation and performance. Hoverfly Cloud allows developers and test engineers to replace the APIs their applications depend on with flexible light-weight simulations. This decouples the development and testing process from unreliable, expensive test systems and restrictive API sandboxes. API simulations can be configured to reproduce unexpected API behaviors such as high latency or random failures. This makes it possible to ensure that applications respond gracefully when the APIs they depend on misbehave. Hoverfly Cloud allows you to speed up delivery, reduce costs, and get resilient software to market faster. ## API Simulation vs Service Virtualization The technique of simulating (or "virtualizing") application dependencies during development and testing is often referred to as Service Virtualization. Service Virtualization solutions usually provide tools for virtualizing HTTP/HTTPS services, database connections, various messaging protocols, and even mainframes. API simulation refers to the virtualization of HTTP/HTTPS APIs only. API Simulation is therefore a type of Service Virtualization. ## Try it out If you are ready to dive straight in, please visit the [Tutorials ](https://docs.cloud.hoverfly.io/tutorials/quickstart)section and complete the Quick start which will get you your first Hoverfly API simulation running in under a minute. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.cloud.hoverfly.io/readme.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.