1. Home
  2. Container Management Software
  3. Mirantis Kubernetes Engine Reviews
  4. User Review of Mirantis Kubernetes Engine
Docker for QA: dockerized Selenium Grid
August 15, 2017

Docker for QA: dockerized Selenium Grid

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Docker

Docker is used for by both the dev team and the QA team on my project. For the dev team it's really useful as they had a lot of issues prior to using Docker with the different setups the devs had: Win/Linux/Mac. After switching to Docker these issues disappeared.

For me as an automation QA lead, it's mainly used for our Selenium Grid. Our grid is running on AWS, and I configured it via Docker. I use docker-compose to start it up and to scale how many browsers should be started. Using only Docker was already a huge help, as we didn't really have to worry about the configurations and it was easy to use the same setup for more instances, but combined with the scaling option of docker-compose it proved to be a really convenient.
  • Develop on multiple platforms. The same Docker image can be used on Linux/Mac/Windows.
  • Ease of configuration. It's very easy to create a base image for your project. There are a lot of already existing images you can use to start with.
  • Scalability. If you need more than just one instance of the same image, it's just a command to spin up more.
  • Finding the perfect configuration: it's very easy to find some basic configurations, but fine-tuning it can be challenging.
  • Understanding the concept can be difficult at first. Most of the question I get from colleagues are around: what's happening inside the docker, how we can see the logs what happens inside etc. One you have the concepts, you can easily do these, but this can be a rough beginning.
  • Sometimes difficult to set it up. I'm mainly hearing about this from colleagues using Windows.
  • The biggest gain for the QA team is the ease with which we can spin up the Selenium Grid. Updating to the latest version means now modifying one line in a yml file, then rerunning a command. That's it, you're up-to-date now.
  • There's of course an initial cost when you have to build the configuration. This proved to be a bigger challenge for colleagues on windows, but eventually it was well worth the invested time.
I had to use virtual machines before, the last one was VirtualBox. I was only a user there, I wasn't responsible for the configuration, it was a black box for me. When I had to use Docker for the first time I was a skeptic, but it proved to be easy. I can't really compare the configuration part, but as a user I find it more straightforward.
I most certainly would encourage everyone to try it. It might not be a good fit for their needs, but knowing about it definitely helps. For me it's very useful because of the way we can set up Selenium Grid with it. As official images are released for it, setting up a working Selenium Grid can be done in 1-2 single commands. If you use Docker Compose it's even easier to spin it up, just create a YML file describing the browsers you want to use, and with one single line you can spin up a grid with X number of different browsers and browser instances.