FAQ

Why use Gridlastic compared to other test environment providers?

The idea with Gridlastic is to provide an instant maintenance free selenium grid in the cloud that you would otherwise have to create and maintain yourself to take advantage of today's low cost cloud environment. Creating your own selenium grid in the cloud is a lot of work and ongoing maintenance and troubleshooting that we take care of so that you don’t have to.

How is it that you can provide so much more test time than your competitors?

We get this question a lot and the simple answer is that cloud computing costs have dropped dramatically over the last few years and we pass all of these price reductions on to you. We also have a solution for using spot instances as selenium grid nodes that have become very popular and provides our customers with huge Amazon discount savings.

How is it that you limit each selenium grid node vm to run one browser session at the time?

We have found that running one browser session at the time on each selenium grid node vm is crucial for robust selenium grid testing operations. The number of non deterministic test failures, browser crashes/interference increases with the number of concurrent browser sessions, to the point it's simply not worth it, not in todays low cost cloud environment. We also have an extensive maintenance process during and between each test session that maintains the selenium grid at optimal performance over long periods of continuous use. We constantly add to this maintenance process as browsers, testing tools and selenium versions progress and over time we have accumulated more than 70 scenarios for which we have developed maintenance tasks that ensures robust selenium grid testing.

Do you support Mac OS test environments?

Not at this time. Gridlastic is based on Amazon EC2 and currently Mac OS instances are not available as regular charged by the hour instances. Instead a lot of our customers use Gridlastic to run 90-95% of their desktop testing using Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Internet Explorer on Windows and Linux at low cost and high speed, and then only a smaller portion using other browsers locally or with other providers when needed.

Can I use Gridlastic for performance testing?

Yes! Performance testing can be a part of your normal test runs and with Gridlastic you can use real browsers instead of virtual browsers which in the past was not economical feasible but in today’s low cost cloud computing environment that is no longer the case. Read more about using selenium grid for performance testing.