Scaling Selenium to infinity using AWS Lambda - Wes Couch & Kurt Waechter | SeleniumConf Chicago

One year ago, our UI test suite took hours to run. Last month, it took 22 minutes. Today, it takes 4 minutes.

By leveraging AWS Lambda and Selenium, we are able to reduce maintenance, improve reliability, and run an unlimited number of tests in parallel.

Creating and maintaining a behemoth Selenium grid poses cost, time, and reliability issues. By thinking smaller, not bigger, we were able to use Selenium in a way that reduces maintenance, improves reliability, all while providing a way to run an unlimited number of tests in parallel.

By packaging Chrome in a special way, we built a set of libraries which enables Selenium tests to run in the highly scalable AWS Lambda “serverless” offering. By creating a special test runner, we enabled an enterprise suite of UI tests to seamlessly execute in AWS Lambda at lightning speed.

Our tests used to execute with 8 tests in parallel, now we execute with 80 tests in parallel (as fast as the product can handle). This extreme speed has enabled BlackBoard engineers to move at a quick pace, all while executing the entire UI test suite on every single commit.

We want to share this industry-disrupting, open-source method to the Selenium Conference and put it on display to enable Selenium users everywhere to make use of this valuable tool.

About Wes Couch
Wes works developing tools and services using AWS Lambda, Kubernetes, and other AWS offerings. Improving the continuous deployment pipeline to contain a suite of tools that developers can leverage to improve their speed and effectiveness while improving quality. Investigates bleeding edge AWS services in order to architect cost-effective and highly scalable solutions.

About Kurt Waechter
Kurt loves creating high-quality software tools for other software engineers. Recently, his focus has been leveraging the AWS 'serverless' suite to make running highly parallel end to end UI tests easier.