Selenium Cloud Computing & Services 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which cloud service model gives Selenium test teams the most control over the underlying OS and runtime environment?
- SaaS
- PaaS
- IaaS (Correct answer)
- FaaS
Correct answer: IaaS
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provides virtual machines where teams can install any OS, browser version, and Selenium runtime they choose.
Question 2: When running Selenium Grid on Kubernetes, what Kubernetes object is used to ensure a fixed number of node replicas are always running?
- Pod
- Deployment (Correct answer)
- ConfigMap
- Ingress
Correct answer: Deployment
A Deployment controller maintains the desired replica count for Selenium Grid node pods and restarts any that fail.
Question 3: Which AWS service allows you to store Selenium test reports and screenshots as objects and access them via a URL?
- AWS RDS
- AWS S3 (Correct answer)
- AWS Lambda
- AWS CloudFront
Correct answer: AWS S3
AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) stores arbitrary objects like HTML reports and PNG screenshots and can expose them via pre-signed or public URLs.
Question 4: What is a primary advantage of using ephemeral cloud VMs for Selenium tests compared to permanent on-premise machines?
- Lower latency to the browser
- Clean browser state for every test run (Correct answer)
- Permanent session persistence
- Built-in Selenium version locking
Correct answer: Clean browser state for every test run
Ephemeral VMs are created fresh per run, eliminating leftover cookies, cache, and extensions that can cause test flakiness.
Question 5: In a cloud-based Selenium setup, what does 'auto-scaling' primarily help with?
- Automatically updating WebDriver binaries
- Dynamically adding browser nodes based on test queue demand (Correct answer)
- Scaling the test code across multiple repos
- Automatically fixing failing assertions
Correct answer: Dynamically adding browser nodes based on test queue demand
Auto-scaling adds or removes Grid nodes in response to the number of queued sessions, reducing cost during idle periods and wait times during peaks.
Question 6: Which cloud-native concept best describes packaging Selenium tests along with their browser, dependencies, and config into a portable unit?
- Virtual Private Cloud
- Container image (Correct answer)
- Object bucket
- Load balancer
Correct answer: Container image
A container image (e.g., Docker) bundles the browser, WebDriver, and test code so the environment is identical everywhere it runs.
Question 7: When storing Selenium WebDriver credentials (e.g., remote Grid username/access-key) in a cloud CI pipeline, what is the recommended practice?
- Hard-code them in the test class
- Store them as encrypted environment variables or a secrets manager (Correct answer)
- Commit them to a public config file
- Pass them as plain-text query parameters
Correct answer: Store them as encrypted environment variables or a secrets manager
Secrets managers or encrypted CI environment variables prevent credential exposure in logs, version control, and build artifacts.
Selenium Cloud Computing & Services 2
Which cloud service model gives Selenium test teams the most control over the underlying OS and runtime environment?