Running Selenium on Steroids : The AWS Lambda’s Way

This article offers a concise argument on why Selenium works really nice with AWS Lambda and gives a step-by-step guide to setup a Selenium server on AWS Lambda.

About Selenium

Selenium is a powerful open-source framework that enables automated testing of web applications across multiple browsers and platforms.

About AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a server-less compute service. This service lets you run code without needing to think about servers.

Why this article?

There can be 100s of real life examples you will find on the net for using Selenium to automate stuff, a simple google search gives examples like Web Scraping, Content Downloading, etc. Though Selenium is easy to use, one of the major problems using it is the fact that it runs on a single machine, hence all requests going to the destination comes from a single IP.

There are 2 ways to solve the problem of a destination (say google.com) limiting/blocking your automation requests:

1. Using a list of internal proxies inside Selenium library

2. Using an external proxy to redirect all your traffic to a list of proxies