February 2020 Summaries

The Robot Framework is a generic open-source automation framework used for acceptance testing, acceptance test-driven development, and robotic process automation. It's Python-based and can integrate with behavior-driven development, allowing user stories to be used in full sentences as an abstraction that connects to test automation scripts. The framework enables test engineers to use Selenium for web browser interactions and automate user behavior on any website. Test cases are agnostic of programming languages and can resemble English sentences instead of traditional programming languages, making it possible for non-developers to write and maintain tests. The Robot Framework has good support through active communities, comprehensive documentation, well-maintained open-source code, many integrations, and the ability to extend the framework easily using Python. It provides an all-in-one test reporting feature that generates clear, concise, and human-readable HTML-test reports after each test run.

The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a clear and detailed explanation for getting started with Kubernetes, but can be overwhelming for developers without DevOps expertise. This post aims to show how to quickly set up a basic Kubernetes cluster using the GCP user interface, allowing users to deploy their first containerized web application. To get started, users must register for a GCP account, create a project, and then click on the console menu to create a new cluster, selecting options such as the Master version of Kubernetes and the default node pool. Once the cluster is set up, users can enable connections from outside their cluster by enabling APIs and creating a service account with the necessary permissions. With this setup, users can deploy their first app to their GCP cluster in minutes using tools like Humanitec, which bridges the gap between configuring deployment environments and deploying code to clusters.