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I recently came across "UI Testing at Scale with AWS Lambda" and I find this quite interesting. If I have understood correctly, they are running test suites in headless Chrome within a Lambda function.

I wonder if it is generally possible to spawn a GUI via AWS Lambda to run any form of GUI-based tests there (i.e. for GUI technologies without a headless mode). All I have found so far is this GitHub project which enables Xvfb in AWS Lambda.

Does anyone know and/or has experience with this?

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  • What do you mean when you say GUI based tests? Headless tests are still interacting with the app, just not rendering the screens out anywhere.
    – ernie
    Commented Jan 17, 2018 at 21:33
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    @ernie for some GUI technologies (e.g. Java Swing) there's no headless mode out of the box. If AWS Lambda supports Xvfb or allows using the native windowing systems of the given OS, it would be possible to also run GUI tests for these technologies.
    – beatngu13
    Commented Jan 17, 2018 at 21:57
  • Ah, makes sense . . . fortunately not in the space where I need to test Swing or Flash or anything crazy.
    – ernie
    Commented Jan 17, 2018 at 22:20
  • @ernie lucky you. ;)
    – beatngu13
    Commented Jan 17, 2018 at 22:24

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I don't have any experience with AWS Lambdas, but I think they trigger tests that are setup in EC2 instance. If You'll use Xvfb or containers like docker You can achieve nice results. I've done something similar, but tests on EC2 instance was triggered by Jenkins builds via ssh not by lambda. And I must say that worked like charm.

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  • They're not triggering tests that are setup in EC2 - they're actually running everything in Lambda processes. It's a pretty creative use of Lambdas,
    – ernie
    Commented Jan 17, 2018 at 21:33

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