From compose.yaml to Testcontainers: testing Kibana with one line of Java

Kibana is a powerful tool for exploring data, building dashboards, and interacting with Elasticsearch. But when developers want to include it in automated tests, demos, or reproducible local environments, the setup often involves multiple moving parts: Elasticsearch, security configuration, and the right connection settings. In this session we will see how Testcontainers can turn that setup into a simple and repeatable developer workflow. Using the recently proposed KibanaContainer for Testcontainers Java as a real-world example, we will explore what it takes to make a sophisticated tool easy to start from code. We will walk through the design decisions behind it: automatically pairing with ElasticsearchContainer, connecting to external clusters, handling authentication and TLS, and providing sensible defaults that work well in automated tests. Finally, we will see how this approach allows developers to start Kibana from Java with just a few lines of code and use it in integration tests, demos, and reproducible development environments. The result is not just a new container class, but a pattern for turning multi-service setups into clean, developer-friendly APIs.