DEV Community: Chandrika Deb

Getting Started With DevOps – A Beginner’s Guide

Chandrika Deb — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 16:37:40 +0000

Are you looking to get started with DevOps or willing to shift gears in your professional career by adding DevOps as a skill? If your answer is yes, you have arrived at the right place!

From startups to multinational businesses, every niche of the technology industry is changing its software development methods. DevOps tools and practices amazingly reduce the operational gap between the development and the operations team, thus the name “Dev-Ops”. It enhances productivity and quality, enables faster deployments, and results in risk-free production processes.

The DevOps market reached USD 5 billion in 2017 and is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 19.04% from 2018 to 2027, reaching USD 14.5 billion in 2027.

When I started my career as a software developer, I often used to think about the need to have green builds for pushing a single line of code. But, with time, I realized the importance of having green pipelines and overall the value of DevOps culture. In layman’s language, one can say, “DevOps is the go-to solution in case you want to work collaboratively without any hustle!”

Read this blog on getting started with DevOps to explore all the aspects of your DevOps journey from scratch. Even if you get your hands dirty with DevOps tools every day, you might want to read this DevOps tutorial to acquaint yourself with the latest tools and practices.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a culture that acts as an enabler of agility. It bridges the gap between the developers and the maintainers by implementing practices of collective responsibility. Traditionally, these teams had a barrier between them, and software packages were metaphorically thrown past the wall. But, with DevOps processes, that barrier is no longer in existence.

Collaboration is one of the guiding pillars of DevOps, which eventually results in faster deployments. In DevOps culture, teams come together and share responsibilities of streamlined builds catalyzed by continuous deployments, automation, and production infrastructure. A cross-functional team improves engagement and communication over traditional silos of perpetual disagreement and time-consuming ticketing processes.

Nowadays, the term DevSecOps is also a buzzword. This flavor of DevOps culture involves maintaining the security compliance of the software right from the project initiation phase till its delivery.

However, in this blog on getting started with DevOps, we will only deal with “DevOps” and explore how to get started with it.

The Contrast: Before DevOps vs After DevOps

Before DevOps came into the picture, software companies followed the traditional ‘Waterfall’ model that worked well for many projects like CRM, inventory management, etc. Yet it has its own set of drawbacks. However, when DevOps came into the picture, it completely changed the software development concept.

This short comparison is enough to let you know why the ‘Waterfall model’ is the thing of the past and why ‘DevOps culture’ is the way forward:

BEFORE DEVOPS	TEST DESIGN TECHNIQUE
Waterfall approach for product delivery	Continuous Software Delivery
Slow launches	Faster feature shipments
Higher downtimes	Faster resolution times
Low productivity due to less transparency	Enhances team productivity
No scope of having green environments	Stable Dev and Prod environments
Difficult to manage and less flexible	Efficient management
Lack of documentation due to less collaboration between teams	Common documentation – Dev and Ops team
Less accountability	Higher rate of satisfaction
Lack of team coordination	Improved collaboration
Less efficient engagement	Higher rate of communication
Less room for improvement	Improved Quality
Haphazard code merge	Speedy execution

DevOps practices have enhanced the collaboration between Development and Operations teams. This collaboration helped in continuous business planning. This collaboration was one of the missing pieces in the ‘Before DevOps’ era, and I have witnessed both eras! 🙂

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1537595611783917568-24'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1537595611783917568&theme=dark" }

DevOps culture has excelled at cutting short and redefining the complex SDLC processes. DevOps helps keep everyone connected to the process so each team member can be more involved in the success of the software deployment.

Getting started with DevOps from Scratch

The journey of DevOps is quite a long one! For an entry-level DevOps Engineer role, you need to equip yourself with some basic concepts of programming and network or cloud infrastructure.

DevOps Roadmap

Don’t be overwhelmed with this complicated roadmap. Below I have curated a brief step-by-step guide for getting started with DevOps.

Strengthening the Foundational Knowledge

It is essential to know the right tools, practices, and concepts for the DevOps team. As per my experience, it is good if the team members know the nuances of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

Below mentioned are a few of the common roles and responsibilities of a DevOps engineer.

Planning of the Project
Development and Deployment within deadlines
Quality Assurance along with proper Testing
Security Compliance and Automation
Effective collaboration with developers, IT, admins, etc.
Software Maintenance, Troubleshooting, etc.

Choosing a Programming Language

It is mandatory to learn a programming language as the first step in your DevOps journey. The popular back-end languages to start your DevOps journey are Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Go, Java, etc.

If you are a novice in the programming field, you can begin with Java or Python. Many cloud providers like Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, etc., have compatible SDKs for these languages. It enables the integration of codebases, lets you debug services/microservices, or automating processes & deployments.

Keeping up with all the changes in the technology industry is an enormous challenge, and organizations, therefore, need to automate repetitive testing processes to ensure that software performs according to expectations and provides value in no time. That’s where a cloud-based automation testing platform like LambdaTest comes to the rescue!

Using LambdaTest, you can perform manual and automated cross browser testing at scale over an online device farm of 3000+ real devices and operating systems. Automation testing tools like LambdaTest allow you to harness the power of cloud-based online Selenium Grids in conjunction with our local grid setups.

Automation testing frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright can be run in a Continuous Integration pipeline on the LambdaTest Grid.

The concepts of scalability, modularity, and efficiency are the key areas to focus on as a DevOps engineer when selecting a programming language.

Understanding Fundamentals of Operating Systems

An operating system (OS) is defined as an interface between the user and the hardware. It is essential to learn a bit about OS concepts as you will work with servers and applications. Hence, it is crucial to know for which OS you will write the code.

Kernel and memory management, threading, concurrency, sockets, POSIX basics, file and I/O management, virtualization, etc., are some of the important OS concepts. Understanding these OS concepts gives you an edge over others as a DevOps engineer in terms of memory and disk usage, optimization, allocation of resources, processes, etc.

At present, Linux is the most used OS in the IT industry. Other examples of OS are Windows, Ubuntu, Fedora, Unix, CentOS, etc. In Fact, as per Statista, the most popular technology skill in the DevOps tech stack in 2021 was Linux, chosen by nearly half of the respondents.

Knowing Basics of Terminal and Shell Scripting

Getting comfortable with terminal commands is a prerequisite to being a DevOps engineer. Practicing these commands daily for process monitoring and manipulation of system performance polishes your scripting skills.

Terminal lets you accomplish different tasks without the use of a Graphical User Interface (GUI). It is also known as console or command line.

Below are some of the basic shell scripting functions to learn to get started with DevOps:

Text Manipulation
Compilation
Bash or Shell Scripting
System Performance
Powershell/VIM, etc.

Understanding Networking Concepts

When running an interconnected system of servers, apps, and resources on a network, it is crucial to learn about the networking and security concepts to diagnose any troubleshooting issues or network issues.

A few of the networking concepts that you must get familiar with are stated below:

TCP/IP network protocols
HTTP and HTTPS
SMTP and FTP
SSL/TLS
Network Forwarding
Firewall and Proxy

Understanding networking allows you to create an environment where you can test your functions and put continuous integration and delivery pipelines in place. Let’s explore the continuous integration and deployment concept in the next section of this article on getting started with DevOps.

Accelerate the delivery pipeline with your favorite CI/CD tools. Try LambdaTest Now!

Check this out: iPhone tester Simulator On Cloud - Run live-interactive or automated testing to ensure a seamless user experience across all Apple devices, iOS simulators and browsers.

Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment

The main keywords associated with DevOps are Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD). It is a norm to implement these practices to adopt the DevOps culture. Without these, DevOps is incomplete!

As per Statista, 62% of organizations at a more advanced stage of their DevOps evolution have adopted Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to meet organizational needs while they continue to adopt self-service capabilities.

This aspect of DevOps helps to make frequent stable deliveries while maintaining the code quality. A Continuous Integration pipeline often runs on the feature and master branches of a code repository. It ensures that your bits of code produce no error when integrated into the shared master repository.

A Continuous Deployment pipeline runs automation tests on the code for a particular release scope. This helps with reducing costs, accelerates delivery timelines, and reduces effort. It also helps to enhance the overall efficiency and team productivity.

The value of Continuous Testing to any DevOps pipeline is incalculable. As much as this is true, it’s also the case that a Continuous testing strategy is the foundation of an effective pipeline.

You can also Subscribe to the LambdaTest YouTube Channel and stay updated with the latest tutorials around Selenium testing, Cypress E2E testing, CI/CD, and more.

Some commonly used best CI/CD tools are Jenkins, GitHub, Bamboo, Ansible, TravisCI, CircleCI, Teamcity, Google Cloud, etc.

Know-How of Monitoring Tools

Having an understanding of Infrastructure and application monitoring is one of the key requirements for stepping into the world of DevOps. Collecting data from servers, network devices, and other services helps you monitor basic metrics such as disk space, throughput, latency, etc. This help finds room for improvement, defect resolution, and health monitoring.

Application monitoring tools help improve efficiency and fix bugs in the apps before users perform some functions. As it is necessary to act upon and send feedback immediately whenever there is any issue, DevOps teams should be proactive and have robust monitoring techniques.

Example tools for infrastructure monitoring are Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Nagios, Splunk, etc. For application monitoring, some example tools are AppDynamics, New Relic, Sumo Logic, etc.

Check this out: XCUITest Tutorial - A Detailed Guide To XCUITest Framework XCUITest is a test automation framework to automate UI testing of iOS applications.

Possessing Foundational Cloud Knowledge

As a beginner DevOps engineer, you need a basic understanding of the cloud. According to Statista, when it comes to cloud computing market share, AWS remains in the first place with a 33% share, followed by Microsoft Azure with 21%. Google Cloud is slowly catching up with a 10% share, which is already impressive because it was launched just a few years ago. For getting started with DevOps, you need to understand the backing services, advantages, product requirements, and providers related to Cloud technology in your organization.

There are several popular Cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, Digital Ocean, etc. These providers have the options of different pricing packages depending on the services offered, memory, CPU requirements, security compliances, etc.

Cloud technologies provide better flexibility, dynamic configurations, controlling web servers and databases, etc. Cloud deployment ensures that you need not rewrite configuration files, and scaling up and down the servers takes place dynamically. Softwares like Nginx can help you manage your servers more efficiently.

Furthermore, several relevant standardized DevOps certifications are available online to help kick off your career as a DevOps Engineer. DevOps Certifications not only enhance your knowledge but also validates your skills in a particular domain that is beneficial for moving ahead in your career graph.

Key Factors to consider before Getting Started with DevOps

The demand for DevOps is always at an all-time high in the IT industry. Hence, it is necessary to understand what DevOps is and, more importantly, what it is not. Organizations often struggle to implement collaboration, agility, and orchestration in their attempt for DevOps evolution.

Therefore, to utilize the metrics-based results that DevOps tools and technologies offer, the organization must be willing to adopt a few incremental changes as mentioned below over the years.

Technological Automation

Learning about automation is an important part of DevOps. The ability to automate hefty processes of managing servers and deployments is something that recruiters look for in an ideal DevOps candidate.

Automation certifications and courses may help to understand the details of automating processes. The approach should be to automate anything you perform manually more than two times. The CI/CD best practices and everything-as-code helps you and your organization adopt the DevOps culture better. You can learn more about it by going through these articles on the importance of automation testing in DevOps and the role of automation testing in the CI/CD pipeline. In a nutshell, automating testing is a backbone for DevOps.

Processes and Practices

The main purpose of DevOps is to regularly deliver small incremental value products or services to the customer. To achieve this feat, one must comply with the chief practices of DevOps — Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD). These small units of incremental delivery are also operationally supported in the production phase.

Shift to DevOps Culture

DevOps is not simply a project that has a definite deadline. Instead, DevOps is a culture that comes with major organizational and technological changes. DevOps teams break down silos by having cross-functional teams and reducing hand-offs, handovers, ticket queuing systems, and dependency mapping. DevOps is a movement or culture shift in application or software development.

The goal of DevOps is to make everyone accountable and work together with full responsibility to break silos or resolve bottlenecks in the whole process and not just the developers.

Check this out: Run Automated Puppeteer Testing Online - Test your Puppeteer test scripts online. Deploy a quality build faster by running automated checks across over 3000+ browsers and OS combinations with the LambdaTest cloud.

Inspect, Adapt, & Learn!

DevOps culture gets driven by the motivation to improve continuously. Retrospective meetings help companies to inspect the setbacks and bottlenecks. “Lessons Learned” meetings help to adapt to the continuous delivery pattern in organizations with DevOps culture in practice. And, knowledge sharing week lets the team learn from each other.

A few certifications like Azure or AWS can help you a lot in climbing up the DevOps ladder. To get started, below are a few accredited certifications that one can complete to begin their DevOps job hunt!

Docker Certified Associate
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Azure DevOps Solution Expert
Udacity Cloud DevOps Nanodegree

Perform reliable automated testing across 3000+ browser environments. Try LambdaTest Now!

Best Practices of a DevOps Champion

While the organization should adopt the DevOps culture and practices and be collaborative, everyone in the team need not be an expert in the DevOps technologies. Companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, RedHat, etc., are constantly hunting for experienced or senior DevOps engineers, often known as DevOps Champions, who would drive the team’s success by implementing DevOps in the correct order!

However, DevOps adoption is not the responsibility of a single person in the team. Instead, it is the job of the whole organization to embrace DevOps as a culture and part of their daily work. Collaboration, communication, and cross-functional approach help you get started with the DevOps mindset of “constant improvement”. Once implemented across teams, DevOps can help you break silos and only focus on delivering value MVP (Minimal Viable Product).

As a DevOps Champion, you will serve as a technical expert on solutions and a voice and champion for users, prospects, and partners, driving feedback to engineers and product management.

Below are some of the characteristics of a DevOps Champion that are usually expected in the IT industry to help the team embrace the culture shift to DevOps.

Check this out: Appium Cloud For App Automation- Test your Native, Hybrid, and Web Apps on Appium mobile device cloud of 3000+ different real devices.

DevOps Knowledge

DevOps is a hard path to go down, and empowering teams is a long-term process. A learning curve will certainly arise with or without a DevOps champion, but speed and clarity of goals will greatly improve with an expert champion on board. Overall, DevOps Champions should encourage developers, quality analysts, business analysts, system administrators, and many others to share a collaborative, iterative, and committed approach to their work.

Basic Everyday Responsibilities

The DevOps Champion is the person responsible for bringing in a DevOps culture. They are accountable for ensuring the success and implementation of all DevOps processes and team identity.

Daily duties of a DevOps Champion usually consist of:

Promoting the benefits of DevOps Culture
Ensure buy-in from both developmental and operational teams
Determining the key roles for success
Ensuring all team members are trained well

Other Important Practices

Once the entire team understands the culture and practices of collaboration-based work, the DevOps Champions can move on to help other areas of your organization. They can turn their focus to implementing sophisticated techniques, such as autoscaling, complex monitoring, and high availability.

Check this out: Jest testing Tutorial - Complete Guide to Jest Testing)

Conclusion

While it may sound tempting to hire a team of DevOps experts and quickly deploy the technologies, there are no cutting corners when transitioning to DevOps. Implementing cultural change in an organization is no easy feat. But in taking the time to correctly help your team embrace the DevOps culture, one day, you may notice and realize that everyone at your organization is, in fact, a DevOps champion.

In this DevOps tutorial on getting started with DevOps, we have presented a brief overview of how to get started with the DevOps buzzword and what your responsibilities will be like as a DevOps engineer. We explored the definition of DevOps, its comparison to traditional processes, skills and certification required, etc. We also discussed the factors to consider before restructuring your organization in a cross-functional way and adopting the DevOps culture. Lastly, we took a look at who are DevOps Champions.

I hope you found this article on getting started with DevOps useful. Please do share your feedback in the comments section.

Building Continuous Quality With Google Cloud CI CD Pipeline

Chandrika Deb — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 14:27:34 +0000

In the present disruptive IT landscape, the latest version deployments get pushed every minute. At the same time, developers must ensure that they align themselves with agile methodologies and practices. Here comes the role of continuous integration and continuous deployment that enables to tackle integration issues as quickly as possible and helps in packaging and delivering risk-free releases to the customer.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the leading cloud services providers in the public cloud market. GCP has a market share of 9% as of Q4 in 2021, according to Statista. Google Cloud CI/CD provides various tools for continuous integration and deployment and integrates seamlessly with third-party solutions.

Google Cloud Build and Google Cloud Run are two Google Cloud services that use pipelines to automate builds and deployments. Cloud Build, Google Cloud’s continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) platform, was named a Leader in a report by The Forrester Wave.

Online Selenium Grid helps to speed up testing. By providing an environment that allows tests to be run on multiple browsers and operating systems simultaneously, you can address cross browser testing issues all at once, saving time over doing so sequentially. A cloud based Selenium Grid helps you focus on writing Selenium test scripts better rather than worrying about infrastructure maintenance.

Google Cloud CI CD pipelines can integrate with the cloud-based automation testing platform LambdaTest, which allows you to perform cross browser testing of web applications on an online browser farm of 3000+ browsers, operating systems, and devices.

With LambdaTest + Google Cloud CI/CD integration, you can also perform local testing of locally or privately hosted projects and parallel testing to cut short test execution cycles and achieve faster go-to-market delivery.

Wondering How To Accelerate Test & Release Velocity? Try LambdaTest Now!

In this article on the Google Cloud CI CD pipeline, we will explore the Google Cloud Platform CI/CD pipeline, its architecture, features, and how its integration with LambdaTest can make CI pipelines more efficient.

So, let’s get started!

Check this out: UI Testing Tutorial- A Comprehensive Guide With Examples and Best Practices

Google Cloud Platform CI/CD

Efficient CI/CD strategies enable companies to deliver better value by reaching out to the market with shorter turn-around times, increasing revenues and gaining market share. CI/CD practices help us proactively resolve bugs, issues, and other problems at a much earlier stage. This practice results in a significant reduction in the overall software development cost.

Now let’s explore the prerequisites for building a Google Cloud CI CD pipeline using its tools, like Google Cloud Build, Google Container Registry, and Source Repository.

Integrate Google Cloud CI with LambdaTest and bring all Testing on Cloud! Try LambdaTest Now!

Cloud Source Repository

You can design, develop, and securely manage your code with Cloud Source Repository. You can collaborate smoothly on a fully featured, scalable, and private Git repository. You also have options to extend your Git workflow by connecting to other Google Cloud tools.

Cloud Source Repositories are fully-featured, private Git repositories hosted on Google Cloud.
Cloud Source Repositories can be used for collaborative, version-controlled development of any app or service, including those that run on App Engine and Compute Engine.
Cloud Source Repositories can connect to an existing GitHub or Bitbucket repository. Connected repositories are synchronized with Cloud Source Repositories automatically.
Cloud Source Repositories automatically send logs on repository activity to Cloud Logging to help track and troubleshoot data access.
Cloud Source Repositories offer security key detection to block git push transactions that contain sensitive information, which helps improve the security of the source code.
They provide built-in integrations with other GCP tools like Cloud Build, Cloud Debugger, Cloud Operations, Cloud Logging, Cloud Functions, and others that let you automatically build, test, deploy, and debug code within minutes.

Want to make your life of testing easy and fuss-free while debugging? Try LT Debug Chrome extension!

Cloud Build

Cloud Build is a service that executes your build on Google Cloud Platform’s infrastructure. Cloud Build can import source code from a variety of repositories or cloud storage spaces, execute build according to your specified specifications, and produce artifacts such as Docker containers or Java archives.

A fully managed, server-less service that executes builds on Google Cloud Platform’s infrastructure.
Can pull/import source code from a variety of repositories or cloud storage spaces, execute a build to produce containers or artifacts, and push them to the artifact registry.
Executes the build as a series of build steps, where each build step specifies an action to be performed and is run in a Docker container.
Build steps can be provided by Cloud Build and the Cloud Build community or can be custom as well.
Build config file contains instructions for Cloud Build to perform tasks based on your specifications, e.g. the build config file can contain instructions to build, package, and push Docker images.
Builds can be started either manually or using build triggers.
Uses build triggers to enable CI/CD automation.

Check this out: Agile Testing Tutorial- A Comprehensive Guide With Examples and Best Practices

Container Registry

We often use the short name GCR for Google Container Registry. Google Container Registry, or GCR, is a service provider on the Google cloud platform that lets us store the Docker images and share them with the team. Now let’s look at some of the features of the GCR:

Container Registry is a private container image registry that supports Docker Image Manifest V2 and OCI image formats.
Container Registry provides a subset of Artifact Registry features.
It stores its tags and layer files for container images in a Cloud Storage bucket in the same project as the registry.
Access to the bucket is configured using Cloud Storage’s identity and access management (IAM) settings.
Integrates seamlessly with Google Cloud services.
Works with popular continuous integration and continuous delivery systems, including Cloud Build and best CI/CD tools such as Jenkins. If you want to create your first Jenkins pipeline, please refer to the Jenkins Pipeline Tutorial and get started.

Artifact Registry

Artifact Registry is a single place for your organization to manage container images and language packages (such as Maven and npm). It is fully integrated with Google Cloud’s tooling and runtimes and comes with support for naive artifact protocols.

Artifact Registry is a fully-managed service with support for both container images and non-container artifacts, Artifact Registry extends the capabilities of Container Registry.
Artifact Registry is the recommended service for container image storage and management on Google Cloud.
Artifact Registry comes with fine-grained access control via Cloud IAM. This enables scoping permissions as granularly as possible, for example, to specific regions or environments as necessary.
Artifact Registry supports the creation of regional repositories.

Cloud Deploy

Google Cloud Deploy is a managed service that automates the delivery of your applications to a series of target environments in a defined promotion sequence. Google Cloud Deploy uses Scaffold to separate rendering tools from the delivery pipeline.

It makes manifest rendering more flexible without affecting how you define your delivery pipeline.

Check this out: Ad Hoc Testing- A Comprehensive Guide With Examples and Best Practices

Google Cloud Platform CI/CD Architecture

A general Google Cloud CI CD pipeline may involve the following steps:

Developer checks the source code to a Version Control system such as GitHub.
GitHub triggers a post-commit hook to Cloud Build.
Cloud Build builds the container image and pushes it to the Container Registry.
Cloud Build then notifies Cloud Run to redeploy.
Cloud Run pulls the latest image from the Container Registry and runs it.

How to build Continuous Quality with Google Cloud CI CD Pipeline?

Using LambdaTest, you can perform both manual and automated cross browser testing at scale over an online device farm of 3000+ real devices and operating systems. Automation testing tools like LambdaTest allow you to harness the power of cloud-based online Selenium Grids in conjunction with our local grid setups.

While the local Selenium Grid is a good start, it is difficult to scale the test efforts exponentially. This is where cloud Selenium Grid can be helpful in reaping the benefits offered by Cloud and Selenium. A cloud Selenium Grid like LambdaTest lets you scale your automation efforts by performing Selenium automation testing at scale on a secure, reliable, and scalable grid on the cloud.

Here’s a quick glimpse of performing Selenium automation testing on the LambdaTest platform.

You can also Subscribe to the LambdaTest YouTube Channel and stay updated with the latest tutorials around automated browser testing, Cypress E2E testing, CI/CD, and more.

If you are a Selenium fanatic, you must have used Selenium 4. Selenium 4 is the latest version of the Selenium WebDriver with a host of new features that makes Selenium automation testing more stable and less flaky than previous versions. However, if you are intrigued to know more about what’s new in Selenium 4, you can go through the Selenium 4 tutorial to learn about the features and improvements in Selenium 4.

And that’s not all! Users can also perform mobile app testing (Android or iOS) on LambdaTest emulators & simulators and real device cloud for a multitude of configurations.

LambdaTest can be used as part of your Google Cloud CI CD pipeline to test your applications. Let us explore more about the prerequisites and the step-by-step guide to integrating LambdaTest with Google Cloud CI.

Some Prerequisites!

Make sure you are ready with the following steps mentioned before integrating Google Cloud CI with LambdaTest:

Your LambdaTest account.
Your code repository, on GitHub/Bitbucket etc.
LambdaTest username and token, found in the top right ‘Access Key’ option on Automation Dashboard.

4- Lastly, login into your Google Cloud CI CD platform and go to Cloud Build API.

5- Click on ENABLE and add a billing account to your Google Cloud Platform for the CI/CD tool to function.

Integrate your code repository with Google Cloud CI

In order to run tests on LambdaTest via Google Cloud CI, we first need to connect our code repository. For this article, let us fork this LambdaTest Repository on GitHub to begin with.

Now let us open our GCP console and follow the below-mentioned steps:

Click on the Console option in the top right corner.
Create a New Project and name it ‘LambdaTest-Google-Cloud-CI-Demo’.

3- Open the left pane of the dashboard and pin the ‘Cloud Build’ tool found under CI/CD category.

4- Click on ‘Triggers’ from the drop-down options.

5- Now we will connect our code repository using the ‘CONNECT NEW REPOSITORY’ option.

6- After that, follow the remaining steps, which are pretty straightforward to complete the integration process.

Running Single Selenium Test Via Google Cloud CI

Selenium is a very popular test framework using which you can create scalable test cases for automated UI testing or cross browser testing. Building and executing Selenium projects with automation platforms is a powerful way to test websites (or web apps) at a faster pace. By using Selenium testing tools, you can test faster, more often, and more accurately.

In this section of this article on the Google Cloud CI CD pipeline, we will try to run our Selenium tests without any cluster or Docker configuration via Google Cloud CI. We just need the correct Cloud Build config file to proceed with this case. Since we have already connected to the repository, which contains some sample TestNG-Selenium tests, now we will run them via Google Cloud Build.

Click on the ‘Create Trigger’ option and provide a name for it.

2- Select the testing code repository and its branch.

3-Under the ‘Configuration‘ option, select Cloud Build configuration file (yaml or json).

4- In the ‘Advanced’ category, select ADD VARIABLE option. Enter your LambdaTest Access Token details as shown below.

5- Click on ‘CREATE’ option, and our trigger project will be created on the selected Google Cloud CI GitHub repository.

6- To run a single test from the sample TestNG Selenium GitHub repository through Google Cloud CI, click on ‘RUN‘ as shown below.

7- The Google Cloud CI console shows the new build which has been triggered. The current status of this build will be ‘Running’ or ‘Successful’.

8- The detailed insights of the test execution can also be found on LambdaTest Automation Dashboard.

Running Parallel Test Via Google Cloud CI
Parallel testing is a process where you run the same tests simultaneously in different environments. The goal of this process is to resolve the limitations of time and budget while still assuring quality.

To run parallel tests on LambdaTest cloud via Google Cloud CI, we need to perform minor tweaks in the cloudbuild.yml file.

Add the following command mvn test -P parallel in the args of the YAML file to allow parallel testing.

Filename: cloudbuild.yaml

steps:
- name: gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker
  args: ['run' , '-d', '--name=lt', '--network=cloudbuild', 'lambdatest/tunnel', '--user', '${_LT_USERNAME}', '--key', '${_LT_ACCESS_KEY}', '--tunnelName', 'GCloud', '--infoAPIPort', '15000','--load-balanced']
- name: curlimages/curl
  args: ['-s', '--retry-connrefused', '--connect-timeout', '5', '--max-time', '5', '--retry', '30', '--retry-delay', '2', '--retry-max-time', '60', 'http://lt:15000/api/v1.0/info']
- name: 'ubuntu'
  args: ['sleep', '20']
- name: 'bash'
  args: ['ls']
- name: 'maven'
  entrypoint: 'mvn'
  args: ['test', '-P', 'local', 'mvn test -P parallel']
  env:
  - 'LT_USERNAME=${_LT_USERNAME}'
  - 'LT_ACCESS_KEY=${_LT_ACCESS_KEY}'

Rebuild and trigger the project again from the Google Cloud Build dashboard to execute the tests in parallel.

Running Local Test Via Google Cloud CI
Local testing is a perfect time saver when you are building and testing on the go. During development, you can run and test your container image locally before deploying. You can use Cloud Code or Docker installed locally to run and test locally, including running locally with access to Google Cloud services.

However, LambdaTest allows you to run your local tests via Google Cloud CI just with the help of a configuration file!

You can test your locally hosted pages and privately hosted pages at the LambdaTest Selenium test automation platform using the LambdaTest tunnel app. Interestingly, you can also run such parallel tests via Google Cloud CI.

To run your local tests on LambdaTest cloud via Google Cloud CI, we need to perform minor tweaks in the cloudbuild.yml file.

Add the following command mvn test -P local in the args of the YAML file to allow local testing.

Filename: cloudbuild.yaml

steps:
- name: gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker
  args: ['run' , '-d', '--name=lt', '--network=cloudbuild', 'lambdatest/tunnel', '--user', '${_LT_USERNAME}', '--key', '${_LT_ACCESS_KEY}', '--tunnelName', 'GCloud', '--infoAPIPort', '15000','--load-balanced']
- name: curlimages/curl
  args: ['-s', '--retry-connrefused', '--connect-timeout', '5', '--max-time', '5', '--retry', '30', '--retry-delay', '2', '--retry-max-time', '60', 'http://lt:15000/api/v1.0/info']
- name: 'ubuntu'
  args: ['sleep', '20']
- name: 'bash'
  args: ['ls']
- name: 'maven'
  entrypoint: 'mvn'
  args: ['test', '-P', 'local', 'mvn test -P local']
  env:
  - 'LT_USERNAME=${_LT_USERNAME}'
  - 'LT_ACCESS_KEY=${_LT_ACCESS_KEY}'

The below snapshot shows the local tests being executed.

Check this out: Data Driven Testing- A Comprehensive Guide With Examples and Best Practices

Conclusion

In this article on building a Google Cloud CI CD pipeline, we have learnt about the Google Cloud CI CD platform, its tools, and architecture in detail. We also learnt about a hands-on, step-by-step guide to running your Selenium tests on the LambdaTest platform via Google Cloud CI. Be it parallel testing or running your local tests, LambdaTest makes it super easy to run your flows via Google Cloud!

I hope you found this article useful. Please do share your feedback in the comments section.