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Using the Amazon Device Farm Service
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Difficulty
Beginner
Duration
11m
Students
238
Ratings
5/5
Description

This is an introductory course for the Amazon Device Farm service. In this course, we are going to start with some important terminology. Then we will discuss the Amazon Device Farm service and its features. We will talk about the benefits of the service. Next, we will talk about why we would use the Amazon Device Farm service. And then, we will discuss how to locate the Device Farm service in the AWS console and describe the basic steps for setting it up. Finally, we will discuss a use case scenario for the Amazon Device Farm service.

Intended Audience

This is a beginner level course intended for anyone who is interested in learning the basics about the Amazon Device Farm service. Before attending this course, you may want to attend the “Benefits of Cloud Computing," and “Fundamentals of AWS” Learning Paths, or attend the “What is Cloud Computing?” and “Technical Fundamentals of AWS” courses. While these are not required to attend this course, they include helpful concepts that might make the content of this course a little easier to understand.

Learning Objectives

  • Describe the features and benefits of the Amazon Device Farm service.
  • Explain when to use the Amazon Device Farm service.
  • Locate the Device Farm service option in the AWS console and discuss how to configure it.
  • And give examples of use case scenarios for Amazon Device Farm service.
Transcript

In this section, we'll discuss how to locate the Amazon Device Farm service in the console, and then describe an Amazon Device Farm use case scenario.

So how do I find Device Farm? Amazon Device Farm can be found in the AWS Management Console at aws.amazon.com. Once you log in to the console from Mobile Services, select Device Farm. From there, you can configure your testing method, run tests and use reports to help you make improvements to your applications.

Now let's look at a scenario using Amazon Device Farm. In this scenario, our company wants to create a simple mobile application to support a marketing campaign. We decided to create a native mobile application to run on iOS and Android devices, so the app can benefit from accessing and using as many native device-specific functions as possible. Running natively on the specific device platforms means that the application can take advantage of features such as autoplay of videos, or support for device-specific location services, as well as other platform-specific features. The choice to target iOS and Android devices for the native app is due to their popularity in the market, but there are many types of phones and platform versions that our customers might be using. We need to ensure a reliable experience for as many devices as possible.

Historically, we stockpiled various devices and relied on emulators with some success, but the variety of device options, platforms, and versions, keeps growing and the maintenance of devices and emulators has become overwhelming and is straining our budget. Our company has analyzed our options and determined that a new solution is necessary. We took advantage of a free trial of Amazon Device Farm and were impressed by the service. Amazon Device Farm provides our developers with a fast and effective way to show and test the app at any time on a variety of native iOS and Android runtimes during the development cycle. This enables our developers to quickly test build iterations of the app on a number of device types from within the Amazon Device Farm service. This also speeds up development and provides us with immediate feedback on any version issues that might affect the user experience. Device Farm provides an effective solution for us and our developers since there are no upfront setup costs or long wait times that are usually associated with user testing on multiple devices.

About the Author

Sarah is an educator and instructional designer. She started her career doing computer training, Microsoft Certified training, then telephony training for a local Indianapolis start up. She has a passion for helping others to learn and writing engaging content. When she is not working, she loves to travel with her family, walk her dog, or curl up somewhere with a good book.