2024-02-06 –, Containerize your robots and run them on Kubernetes
Harnessing Kubernetes to run Robot Framework tests in containers offers a practical solution for scaling your test executions in a cloud environment. This workshop will provide hands-on guidance for running Robot Framework within Docker containers and mastering the fundamentals of Kubernetes, the container orchestration platform.
The advent of the container orchestration platform Kubernetes has revolutionized the development of modern software architectures and the seamless migration of containerized workloads to the cloud. The intricacies of relocating your test infrastructure and test execution to the cloud may seem daunting, but the rewards are profound when you harness the scalability and resource management capabilities of Kubernetes. Join us for an enriching workshop at Robocon 2024, where we'll explore the potential of Kubernetes in optimizing your testing.
In this hands-on workshop, you'll learn how to containerize your RobotFramework test executions effectively. We'll work together to create Kubernetes manifests for defining and managing these executions. Participants will collaborate within a shared Kubernetes cluster environment, promoting practical knowledge sharing and discussions around diverse approaches. Our focus will be on real-world best practices for running tests in cloud environments, with a specific emphasis on utilizing Kubernetes features.
All workshop details and materials will be shared in an open-source github repository.
In the first quarter of the workshop, we’ll look into containerizing Robot Framework tests. We’ll look at a simple example as well as the ppodgorsek/robot-framework image and on how to customize images for specific test dependencies. Over all we’ll dive deep into the capabilities of Dockerfiles https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/builder/.
In the second quarter, we’ll learn about Kubernetes and go through the creation of a web application via Kubernetes manifest files. We’ll learn about different Kubernetes objects like deployments, pods, volumes, jobs and cronjobs and we’ll use kubectl to analyze and edit them.
In the third quarter, we’ll apply the learnings from the previous two quarters and build a Kubernetes manifest for a Robot Framework test run. As part of this we’ll also explore different ways of exposing the test reports from the ephemeral test run in the cluster.
In the last quarter, we’ll discuss scaling of test runs in Kubernetes. We’ll run a few different scenarios with pabot and learn how to investigate the resource consumption in the cluster. As part of this we’ll also discuss limits of pabot and how upcoming ecosystem projects are planning to address those.
Optionally, when time allows we can look into the KubeLibrary and see how it can be utilized to harden your test runs on top of Kubernetes.
Describe your intended audience:The intended audience for this workshop are test engineers working on test infrastructure. None the less also RPA users can use the knowledge provided to run RPA tasks in their cloud environments.
Is this suitable for ..?:Intermediate RF user, Advanced RF user
Markus has using Robot Framework for more than 7 years now. During this time his roles varied from automation engineer, test automation architect, tech sharing evangelist to cloud qa engineer. He is maintainer of Camunda Library and Robot Framework Webservice. He is currently in to running Robot test cases as service and in to deploying test cases to cloud infrastructure.
Nils is Principal QA Engineer at Humanitec. He has worked in software testing for more than 20 years, in different industries like finance, games and developer platforms. He specializes in test automation for web apps based on Microservice Architectures.