Funny, I avoided running a tomcat instance on purpose. My reasoning is that we aren't trying to test that the servlet works in a container that runs servlets. We are trying to test that the servlet operates correctly on well-formed requests and sends data into flume. I think it would be valuable to test using tomcat only if we are running the actual maven commands (or something very similar) that exercises the maven configuration. Testing that tomcat works seems outside of scope to me, unless there is reason to suspect we will make a change to the servlet that won't run in tomcat?