Interesting.. I've chatted with Tim and learned a lot of people run Puppeteer on Lambda.. there is an easier way (spoiler - I work on the open source project OpenFaaS) - https://www.openfaas.com/blog/puppeteer-scraping/
Hope it's of some use to folks who may be struggling to compile lambda-chrome or with local testing.
I used Selenium a lot in a past life, so this post is interesting to see, but the UX and maintenance cost is also going to need to be factored in with bigger suites of tests.
This is certainly a good approach if you need that extra performance or plan on heavy use and that outweighs the extra ops. In my own experiments with Chrome and Puppeteer on Lambda, it has been rather slow as you also noticed.
With that said, if someone does want to use Lambda, it's easier than outlined in the article. Use one of the layers listed at https://github.com/shelfio/chrome-aws-lambda-layer and then `require('chrome-aws-lambda')` works fine, making it easy to throw something together even in the AWS console's own editor.
The combination of headless browsers and any form of FaaS / Lambda / serverless solution is immensely powerful. There are all kinds of businesses popping up around this tech stack, of which my business is one.
OpenFaaS is a great alternative that we will surely test drive.
AWS now supporting containers on Lambda will hopefully make shipping browser binaries to Lambda also easier.
Hope it's of some use to folks who may be struggling to compile lambda-chrome or with local testing.
I used Selenium a lot in a past life, so this post is interesting to see, but the UX and maintenance cost is also going to need to be factored in with bigger suites of tests.