I have uploaded the slides from my talk Enterprise Build and Test in the Cloud at JavaOne in San Francisco.
You can check also the code, and an introduction in previous posts
Enterprise build and Test in the Cloud with Selenium I
and
Enterprise build and Test in the Cloud with Selenium II.
I’ll be presenting Enterprise Build and Test in the Cloud at JavaOne in San Francisco, Wednesday June 3rd 11:05am Esplanade 301 and will be around the whole week.
You can check the slides from the previous talk at ApacheCON, the code, and an introduction in previous posts
Enterprise build and Test in the Cloud with Selenium I
and
Enterprise build and Test in the Cloud with Selenium II.
Here you have the slides from my talks at ApacheCON
Building and testing software can be a time and resource consuming task. Cloud computing / on demand services like Amazon EC2 allow a cost-effective way to scale applications, and applied to building and testing software can reduce the time needed to find and correct problems, meaning a reduction also in time and costs. Properly configuring your build tools (Maven, Ant,…), continuous integration servers (Continuum, Cruise Control,…), and testing tools (TestNG, Selenium,…) can allow you to run all the build/testing process in a cloud environment, simulating high load environments, distributing long running tests to reduce their execution time, using different environments for client or server applications,… and in the case of on-demand services like Amazon EC2, pay only for the time you use it.
In this presentation we will introduce a development process and architecture using popular open source tools for the build and test process such as Apache Maven or Ant for building, Apache Continuum as continuous integration server, TestNG and Selenium for testing, and how to configure them to achieve the best results and performance in several typical use cases (long running testing processes, different client platforms,…) by using he Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud EC2, and therefore reducing time and costs compared to other solutions.
Eclipse IAM (Eclipse Integration for Apache Maven), formerly “Q for Eclipse”, is an Open Source project that integrates Apache Maven and the Eclipse IDE for faster, more agile, and more productive development. The plugin allows you to run Maven from the IDE, import existing Maven projects without intermediate steps, create new projects using Maven archetypes, synchronize dependency management, search artifact repositories for dependencies that are automatically downloaded, view a graph of dependencies and more! Join us to discover how to take advantage of all these features, as well as how they can help you to improve your development process.
If last week I mentioned the two conferences I got talks accepted, ApacheCON and EclipseCON, now I just got the confirmation that my talk Enterprise build and test in the cloud was accepted for JavaOne, June 2-5 in San Francisco
You can read a little bit about what I’m going to talk about in my posts
Enterprise build and Test in the Cloud with Selenium I
and
Enterprise build and Test in the Cloud with Selenium II, probably a 3rd part coming after ApacheCON.
The conference season is starting, ApacheCON EU will be held 23-27 March in Amsterdam, and EclipseCON on the same dates in Santa Clara, California.
I got talks accepted in both, and had to choose between Santa Clara and Amsterdam… and yes, I’m going to Amsterdam :D, but no worries, I was able to convince another of the Eclipse IAM committers, Mike Poindexter, to give my talk at EclipseCON.
There are other Maven related talks at ApacheCON, and we’ll probably have a JUG.
Enterprise build and test in the cloud Friday 27th
Eclipse IAM, Maven integration for Eclipse, Thursday 26th
Apache Continuum – Build, Test, and Release, Friday 27th by Wendy Smoak
Managing Your Repositories With Archiva, Friday 27th by Maria Odea Ching
Eclipse IAM, Maven integration for Eclipse, Thursday 26th, by Mike Poindexter
If you are going there, say hi! It’s a great opportunity to meet the people behind that open source stuff that you use everyday 😉
Taking the idea of using Lava Lamps as notification tools for your Continuous Integration status, green lamp for success, red lamp for failure, the so called eXtreme Feedback Devices, and using as a guide the instructions in Pragmatic Automation, I have made some improvements to use remote notification, meaning that lamps don’t need to be connected to the build server, and a more automated process, that will turn off the lamps out of business hours.
The code is in a new project, Continuous Lava, in case it’s useful for somebody else. There are two parts, one for Apache Continuum and one for CruiseControl.
Actually, it is not necessary to use lava lamps but you can turn on and off any device you plug to the X10 power adapters. Imagine a loud siren, or my favorite, electric discharges to developer’s chairs!!! (we’ll leave this as an idea for future projects)
UPDATE: fixed the link to Pragmatic Automation
In my previous entry I introduced Selenium and a setup for running automated builds in the browser.
How can you achieve the multi-browser multi-environment testing?
There is a subproject of Selenium called Selenium-Grid that works in a heterogeneous cluster of machines. Install a selenium hub in one server and start the selenium remote clients in the machines with the environments you want to test. For instance you can have a windows machine with IE 7 and Firefox 3, another one with IE 6, a linux machine with Firefox 2 and a OS X with Safari. There’s no limit in the number of machines that you can attach to the hub, and the hub redirects the tests to the machine that fulfills the environment you request in your tests.
At this point you can have a very nice integration testing environment, with the continuous integration server deploying your app every day, and running the Selenium tests in several machines with different operating systems and browsers.
Now the bad news, you may have noticed already that having a bunch of machines dedicated to QA just to run once a day can be quite expensive. Another issue is that Selenium tests, as they run in the browser, are not particularly fast.
But it’s a great use case for cloud computing. Using Amazon EC2 you can have machines with different environments (Linux, Windows, Solaris,…) and browsers (IE, Firefox,…) and pay just for the time they are running. Let’s say you need 5 combinations of OS/browser and your tests take 2 hours in each of them. If you run the tests once a day you could end paying
5 machines * 30 days * 2 hours * 0.10 $/hour (approx) = 30$ month, results in 2 hours
compare it with the cost of 5 machines, power, space, hardware maintenance,…
Not only that, but you could parallelize your tests, using Selenium with TestNG for instance, and get the results faster. Particularly, using EC2, if you start twice as many machines to get the results in one hour instead of two, you would pay
10 machines * 30 days * 1 hours * 0.10 $/hour (approx) = 30$ month, results in 1 hour
exactly the same!
And if you need to really really get those results fast, you are not constrained by your hardware
100 machines * 1 day * 1 hours (the minimum charge is one hour) * 0.10 $/hour (approx) = 10$ day, but with results in 6 minutes
assuming that your tests are split and can be run properly in parallel.
You can see a demo of how does it work in our Maestro S+ page. Obviously you can set this environment up yourself, but if you need help we can assist you setting the environment up, creating an outsourced on-demand QA team, or subscribe to a fully hosted service where we will handle all your continuous integration and testing needs using open source, Apache licensed, software, with a continuous integration server, Apache Continuum, artifact repository, Apache Archiva, and a list of browsers and environments to test on that we’ll maintain for you, and paying just for the time you need them.
I introduced Amazon Web Services and Cloud computing in previous posts (Amazon Web Services: an introduction, habemus Windows, tools), now let’s get full advantage of them in a practical application.
For those not familiar with Selenium, it’s a testing library that allows you to write integration tests to run in the browser, and when I say in the browser I mean it, you can tests how web applications behave when using different browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari,… and we all know how painful cross-browser compatibility can be.
With Selenium you can write the tests in different languages: Java, Ruby, Groovy,… but, and this is a huge plus, you can also record them in Firefox using the Selenium IDE AddOn, and then run them with playback or export them to any of the languages supported.
Now follow me to this scenario. You have a team of developers writing a webapp. You can take anybody with a minimum experience (an user!) and tell them to use the site while SeleniumIDE records what they are doing. Then export the recording and add it to your integration builds to make sure it doesn’t break in future developments. Imagine also what you could achieve with experienced QA people, that don’t need to be developers at all nor know the internals of your app, and that can apply QA practices, trying to make your webapp break in any possible way. Sounds interesting? Keep reading
Let’s say that the site needs to be supported in different browsers too, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. With Selenium you can run the same tests previously recorded against any browser.
At this point you have a development practice where developers develop, and a QA team that can be just test experts, not developers, either inside or outside your company or department, recording and running tests using only the requirements. Not a bad thing to have, but let’s make it better using automation.
Let’s assume you already have a working automated build and continuous integration, I know for many people is a big assumption, but let’s have hope ;), and assume you are using Maven and Continuum, not necessary, but that’s what I’m more familiar with. It is pretty easy to add Selenium testing to run as part of the build. With the Selenium Maven plugin you can start the Selenium server, launch the tests that will run the browser and execute the in-browser testing, and stop Selenium server at the end. When you have that running on Maven is straightforward to get it working in Continuum. For the gory technical details you can read my previous post Functional testing with Maven, Cargo and Selenium.
Will continue in my next entry…
Second entry in the series: Amazon Web Services: an introduction
Amazon provides some tools to interact with its Web Services, and many others exist provided by 3rd parties. Here is my selection
JetS3t is a free, open-source Java toolkit and application suite for the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The toolkit provides Java programmers with a powerful yet simple API for interacting with S3 and managing data stored there, while the applications allow anyone to easily manage and interact with their S3 accounts.
JetS3t is composed by a java library to access S3, a command line tool to synchronize local folders to S3 (s3sync) and a GUI to upload/download files (cockpit)
A graphical interface to Amazon EC2 web service as a Firefox addOn, provided by Amazon
You can do pretty much everything with it, register instances, start/stop them, manage access keys, security groups, elastic ips,
EBS volumes,…
A web based interface to Amazon EC2 launched recently by Amazon. Same functionality as ElasticFox
The command line version, you won’t need it if using ElasticFox, unless the command line is your thing
The Amazon EC2 AMI Tools are command-line utilities to help bundle an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), create an AMI from an existing machine or installed volume, and upload a bundled AMI to Amazon S3.
Even using ElasticFox you’ll need it in your running instances to create new images from them (only for *nix, Windows images are bundled from Elasticfox or other GUI)
Morph AppSpace allows you to run webapps with no effort. You provide them with a war (for Java) or your Rails, Grails or PHP app and they’ll run it for you in the cloud, with a DB (postgres or mysql) with warm backups, a webserver, continuosly monitored and a two machine cluster for load balancing and high availability, all from 1$ a day. There’s a development version to try it for free.
How it works for Java apps? You just need to access your database connection pool using JNDI. They will provide you the resource name to use.
Morph AppCloud is another product that adds more flexibility, providing a web based cluster editor where you can design your cloud just by dragging and connecting the modules provided (ie. Jetty web server, mysql master, mysql slave, load balancer,…), then just click to run it.
Disclaimer: I know the guys behind Morph and have done some work for them
It’s a lower level service where you can interact with all the EC2 operations. You can create images, start/stop them, health montirs,… all through their web interface. You have a developer edition to try it for free
It’s more of a provisioning system where you select components and create an image (Elastic Server) to run it in EC2, VMware, and other virtualization frameworks, and with a management web interface to start/stop the components, monitor the services running,…
They have a list of components and templates, mostly open source projects, and you can add your own too.
I have uploaded the slides from my talk Q4E and Eclipse IAM, Maven integration for Eclipse at ApacheCon in New Orleans. You can download them from the session page. It’s an introduction on the features, the roadmap, integration with other plugins,… Talk went well, few questions during the Q&A round but a lot more as I left the stage 😉
If you are interested in Maven, you can check too Brett Porter‘s talk More Apache Maven Best Practices.
The rest of ApacheCon is being great, a lot of networking as usual, attending a few talks to get introduced on some interesting technologies and drinks on the nearby, Bourbon street, walking distance (or crawling, depending on who are we talking about).
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