What is Zalenium?

Zalenium is a container-native Selenium Grid... with elastic scaling… with Selenium Grid Extras functionality… and the ability to route out to Selenium-as-a-Service Providers

Selenium

Send Test Requests (check that a searchbar is loaded) to manipulate or verify actions in a real browser on a real operating system.

Problems

• Not able to easily observe what's happening.
• Not everyone's OS and Browser version is the same when running tests.
• "It works on my machine"

Docker-Selenium

• Containerized
• Chrome and Firefox on linux
• Fixed at a certain version
• Immutable

Problems

• Very Few Browsers
• Concurrency
• Limited in Platform (only linux)

Selenium Grid (Extras)

• Various Browsers and Platform supported
• Various Versions of Browser supported
• Video recording!
• Single Hub!

Problems

• Difficult to maintain
• Difficult to keep nodes alive
• Manually update browser versions

Zalenium

Zalenium Docker Process

Isn't that just (containerized) Selenium Grid Extras?

• Point all incoming Selenium Tests at single Hub
• Control Many Browsers and Platforms
• (not shown) Video Recording

But wait! There's more!

Zalenium "Creates" Docker-Selenium Nodes

Zalenium "Proxies" to Se-as-a-Service

What is Selenium-as-a-Service?

Selenium Providers

• Browserstack
• Saucelabs
• TestingBot

What do they provide?

• Impossibly Large Browser/Platform Compatibility

• https://bit.ly/2PFB4we

• Point all incoming Selenium Tests at single Hub
• Video Recording
• Screenshots
• <Insert Marketing Material Here>

So why use Zalenium?

Let's set it up!

Let's set it up!

Let's Use it!

Walkthrough

• http://0.0.0.0:4444/grid/console
• http://0.0.0.0:4444/grid/admin/live?refresh=5
• http://0.0.0.0:4444/dashboard/#

Demo Summary

• Demonstrate the UI in Zalenium
• Run any Selenium-based project on Zalenium
• Running local to your Zalenium node is faster than running in the cloud
• Run multiple tests in parallel
• Elastically provision selenium hosts
• Run locally and in the cloud simultaneously
• View Videos captured on both

What wasn't shown

• The ability to swap between Testingbot, Saucelabs, and Browserstack on the fly
• Running from CI (it's exactly the same)
• It can run on any Container platform or any Kubernetes platform out-of-the-box
• Connect any existing Selenium Grid Nodes to Zalenium Hub
• Tune various parameters
• Scaling! (Up to 1000 concurrent tests)

Cost Comparison

Pricing Overview

• It's all based on concurrency and minutes.
• Max of 24 Parallel Tests can cost $4800/month -- excluding Mobile
• Per Minute Pricing available

SaaS Comparison

Testing bot is always cheaper.

There are 43800 Minutes in a month (had to look that up)

SaaS vs Zalenium (on GKE)

Rule of Thumb: 1 Selenium Container needs 1 cpu and 1 GB Ram. 2 CPU if recording video

$0.20/minute vs $0.000792/minute standard or
Saucelabs is 25,252% more!
Even less if running preemptible nodes

How to Leverage the SaaS race to the bottom

No Vendor Lock-in

• Zalenium Runs anywhere (GKE, Docker, AWS ECS, Openshift).
• GKE is cheapest right now.
• Zalenium doesn't care about hosting Selenium-as-a-Service providers. It's a neutral endpoint with a proxy.
• Testingbot is cheapest for now... you can change anytime.

CI/CD Pipeline Design

• Only Run Multibrowser testing when necessary.
• Let Chrome/Firefox run first. If those succeed, then run the rest of the Matrix.
• Put your Zalenium cluster closest to your CI test executors. e.g. Jenkins Agents
• Don't run a matrix... run an array!

Matrix as an array

• Instead of running all the Browser/Platforms concurrently (and paying more money), run in serial.
• i.e. Pay $800/month for 4x Concurrent and the test runs take twice as long for half the cost of 8x
• Great if you want to run your tests at night

Conclusion

• Zalenium
• Selenium-as-a-Service
• Live Demo! (Something probably broke?)
• $$$
• Leverage Zalenium in CI/CD

Thanks!