How to Deploy Selenium grid on AWS / Amazon EKS

  

                                    Selenium Grid is good for parallel execution but maintenance is a nightmare in an era where you see a frequent upgrades to browsers and corresponding drivers. No sooner the usage of automation framework / selenium grid increases, scalability and maintenance becomes a challenge. To address such issues, we do have solutions based on dockers, docker swarm etc. Having said that, there are some caveats in scaling, managing container health etc.

Below solution would try to address most of them. Major chunks of the solution include Selenium, Zalenium, Docker, Kubernetes and Amazon EKS.

This article would outline the process of deploying Selenium grid(Zalenium) on AWS (Amazon EKS) using Kubernetes and Helm.

What do we achieve with this setup..?

• Scalability: EKS can scale the nodes and pods as per the given configuration.
• Visibility: Zalenium provides a feature to view the live executions on the containers.
• Availability: Amazon EKS cluster makes selenium grid available all the time.
• Maintenance: Low maintenance as the containers are destroyed after each execution.

Pre-requisites:

• An active Amazon AWS account.
• IAM user is created in AWS account
• AWS CLI is connected to AWS account providing the user credentials using local powershell or any terminal
                                                              OR
• Use AWS cloudshell which is automatically connected to logged in account.
• Install AWS CLI (for local terminal), kubectl, helm in the given order.

Lets Get Started!

Once the above pre-requisites are met, next task to deploy any application on kubernetes is to create a kubernetes cluster. There are different ways to create a cluster on AWS, I'll brief couple of ways to achieve the same.

First, Create cluster from AWS GUI.

1. Create master node or cluster 

• Open Amazon EKS console
• Choose Create Cluster
• Provide details like cluster name, k8s version, role
• Select VPC, security groups, endpoint access
• Further steps as shown on GUI which will make 'master' ready.

2. Create worker nodes and connect to the above created cluster.

• Create Node Group (Amazon EC2) instances.
• Choose the cluster, to which the above node group should get attached.
• Select security group, resources etc.,
• Define min and max number no. of nodes.

Sounds complex?. No issues, there is another simple and efficient way to make the whole process look simple.

Second, Create cluster using eksctl (The official CLI for Amazon EKS)

The above complex task can be achieved with a single command.