You have probably heard of Sauce Labs.
They offer a Selenium Grid SaaS and now a whole lot more.

You probably also know about Atlassian OnDemand for Jira defect tracking & task management, Confluence wiki, Bamboo build automation and continuous, etc.

And no doubt you’ve used GitHub, Bitbucket, or some other online source repository.

These some examples of tools that can help you accomplish the goal of performing test automation in the cloud.

And of course, there is the cloud platform itself. Amazon ECS, Rackspace Cloud, Microsoft Azure.

You need defect tracking, test management, build automation, documentation, source control, and automation tools. You need a test environment and a variety of clients to test on. And you need it all to work together.

What are some of the obstacles to test automation in the cloud?

1) Fear of putting proprietary code (and data!) on a public cloud
2) Too many tools and vendors to keep track of and coordinate
3) Creating a seamless integration that works together

But what are some of the advantages of running your test automation in the cloud?

1) Quicker provisioning of hardware resources and ability to scale on demand
2) Ease of administration of uniform architecture provided by virtualization
3) Simplified workflow for distributed teams

I’m working on a short book about steps you can take to leverage the cloud and cloud services to help make test automation easier, faster, and more meaningful for development teams.

I’d love to have feedback from people on their experiences, questions, and advice.