LambdaTest Improves Software Test Insights and Cuts Dashboard Response Time by 33% Using Amazon Redshift

More than two million software developers and testers across the globe rely on LambdaTest, a continuous quality testing platform, to ensure quality code and ship their software to customers faster. The platform, which runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), provides both manual and automated testing of web and mobile apps across more than 3000 different browsers, mobile devices, and operating systems. LambdaTest is used in over 130 countries and has hosted more than 200 million tests to date.

For the past several years, LambdaTest’s enterprise clients have been seeking analytical dashboards where they can quickly view insights and reports on test orchestration, execution, and results. “Our customers didn’t have a snapshot view of what tests had been run or what had failed,” says SS Rahman, head of technical integration at LambdaTest. To address this, the company attempted to build a new analytics solution with MySQL as the data source. However, database queries often took up to 15 seconds to complete, and the solution couldn’t meet the company’s goal of providing response times under 10 seconds. The result? A poor customer experience, and one that could not scale easily to support the millions of new records coming in every year. 

To design a new analytical dashboard solution, LambdaTest leveraged the AWS Data Lab program, an internal AWS community that offers technical resources and hands-on support for customers looking to accelerate data and analytics initiatives. Specifically, LambdaTest participated in the AWS Build Lab, an intensive multi-day engagement in which AWS Data Lab Solutions Architects and other AWS experts provide architectural guidance, share best practices, and remove technical roadblocks. “AWS has always been very available and helpful. When we discussed our latency and performance issues during the AWS Build Lab, AWS proposed the perfect solution,” Rahman says.

The solution is based on Amazon Redshift, a cloud data warehouse that uses SQL to analyze both structured and semi-structured data. The AWS team helped LambdaTest create a proof of concept (POC) for a new customer-facing dashboard that queries data from Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and ingests it in Amazon Redshift. The test metadata includes pass, failure, and completion information for each test. The dashboards also feature a variety of trend graphs and charts to visualize the distribution of test results among browsers, operating systems, and apps.

Working with the AWS Data Lab team, LambdaTest completed the dashboard POC in four weeks. “If we managed this project on our own instead of relying heavily on the expertise of AWS, we would have taken at least eight weeks,” says Rahman.