Using AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild and Lambda for automated UI testing (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Using AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild and Lambda for automated UI testing (2017)

aws.amazon.com

59 pointskiyanwang12 comments

A note for 2018: currently you would want to use headless Chrome (Puppeteer) or headless Firefox instead of PhantomJS. the later has been 'archived': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16511860

It's a bit sad but unsurprising to see these kinds of demos apparently using the maximum number of proprietary AWS offerings. It'd be a bit more reassuring to see a design that could be ported to different infrastructure, or run locally.

why would amazon promote anything else but their own stack?

Customers will check what options they have. A lot of them want to avoid lock-in. It would be intelligent by Amazon to not ignore the competition (because customers won't) and instead talk about the advantages and disadvantages of their tech in relation to what the customer is trying to do.

In my experience, people shopping for solutions will latch onto one that claims to do what they need. They then build a vendor comparison matrix that results in selecting that technology, but makes it look like they considered alternatives. This is because people don't make rational decisions, but instead rationalize decisions.

The tack they took here is, IMO, the most efficient. It's an easier effort to publish this article than one exploring other options, and provides a linear path to success for naive readers (rather than introducing the "other options" branching paths).

We love using CodeCommit->CodePipeline to auto deploy builds (from Phabricator) to our Elastic Beanstalk instances.

But please, please, please Amazon, can you let CodePipeline deploy a static website directly to an S3 bucket that has been set up to host a static HTML/CSS site? I am astounded that this basic functionality is not already there (i.e. as S3 bucket as the destination of a CodePipeline), and it would make the deployment of our documentation and even marketing sites a LOT smoother (i.e. without having to use Lambda or third party services as we do now).

I believe that is possible. Here's an example pipeline:

https://github.com/stelligent/devops-essentials/blob/master/...

There's just something about Amazon's YAML or JSON (IAM policies, Cloudformation, etc) that just make them unbearable to look at. And the more you stay within Amazons ecosystem, the complexity just grows.

Shippable, Travis, CircleCI etc. The configuration not only looks nicer, but is so much easier to setup.

Is there a way to test on IE/Edge? That is the biggest painpoint for us as developers are already using Chrome/Firefox and most of the bugs arise from not testing Microsoft products

Also, if you are testing on Chrome/Firefox, what is the advantage to also running tests through Phantom?

If you want to make life easier on yourself you could just use something like Sauce labs. https://saucelabs.com/platforms#

or BrowserStack :-) https://www.browserstack.com/test-in-internet-explorer

Love the idea of being able to run the tests in parallel. In order for me to use this type of setup I'd need to figure out a good way to interact with the database for setting up background data and verifying persistence.

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