When Gonzalo Diethelm asked me whether there is a way to echo the http request to validate Lambda@Edge functions that modifies the request by adding / updating / deleting headers? I couldn’t find something that’s already available. Hence I quickly created a simple Lambda function front-ended by Application Load Balancer to just return the response that it has recieved. Read more

Since the post Using AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS Lambda for Serverless Automated UI Testing was published, things have evolved with Chrome headless and Firefox headless being supported natively. AWS Lambda now supports container images, AWS Step Functions has added support for Map state and its integration with Lambda, and AWS Fargate has enabled automating the UI testing completely using serverless technologies. The goal of this post is to demonstrate how to use AWS Developer Tools) to build a continuous delivery pipeline that automatically deploys a test environment and runs a UI test against it. We also explain how to build a container image which includes Chromium browser, Firefox browser, Selenium, and its dependencies, which are used in Lambda and Fargate. You can accelerate the testing by launching multiple test cases in parallel using the Map state in Step Functions. Read more

Testing the user interface of a web application is an important part of the development lifecycle. In this post, I’ll explain how to automate UI testing using serverless technologies, including AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS Lambda. I built a website for UI testing that is hosted in S3. I used Selenium to perform cross-browser UI testing on Chrome, Firefox, and PhantomJS, a headless WebKit browser with Ghost Driver, an implementation of the WebDriver Wire Protocol. I used Python to create test cases for ChromeDriver, FirefoxDriver, or PhatomJSDriver based the browser against which the test is being executed. Resources referred to in this post, including the AWS CloudFormation template, test and status websites hosted in S3, AWS CodeBuild build specification files, AWS Lambda function, and the Python script that performs the test are available in the serverless-automated-ui-testingGitHub repository. Read more

AWS Trusted Advisor is an important tool which provides more than 50 checks across four different categories Cost Optimization, Performance, Security & Fault Tolerance (at the moment of writing this post). But I have noticed that this is not being used more extensively considering the importance of it. Hence I created couple of lambda functions which shall be configured to run on daily basis to refresh the checks and create summary of all the checks and send an email. Read more

EBS snapshot as backup mechanism is a very common practice and it also has been defined in Backup and Recovery section of EC2 best practices. If you have read my another article Save AWS costs by scheduled start and stop of EC2 instances, similar approach will be used in creating Snapshots too. Using JSON in EC2 Tags enables us to provide granular configuration details. Create an EC2 tag with name as backup and value with details containing time to take backup and retention period. Read more