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Marathon Cloud vs OSS Marathon

Marathon Cloud is a managed test execution platform built on the core technology of the open-source Marathon test runner. This page is for teams that run OSS Marathon today and want to know what changes.

OSS Marathon uses a Marathonfile (YAML) for configuration. Marathon Cloud uses CLI flags for all execution parameters. A run is fully described by its command line, so it can be triggered from any CI environment without a separate configuration file.

The test filter file used with the --filter-file flag follows the same schema as the OSS Marathon filteringConfiguration. You can reuse existing filter files between OSS and Cloud.

Feature OSS Marathon Marathon Cloud
Infrastructure Self-hosted (Local, SSH, Kubernetes) Managed (Global device fleet)
Device provisioning Manual Automatic
Scaling Manual Unlimited auto-scaling
Artifact hosting Manual Included (30-day retention)
Live dashboard No Yes
Run-time target None 15 minutes; pool sized from suite history
Feature OSS Marathon Marathon Cloud
Batching Configurable Chosen from suite history; --isolated forces batch size 1
Sharding Manual config Automatic; cap with --concurrency-limit
Retries Manual config Reactive, preventive, and uncompleted quotas with platform defaults; override with --retry-quota-* or --no-retries
Sorting Manual config Optimized by historical data
Pooling Custom rules Global fleet

Use this table to find the Marathon Cloud equivalent for OSS Marathonfile keys.

OSS Marathonfile key Marathon Cloud CLI flag
filteringConfiguration --filter-file (same schema; allure, fragmentation, and annotationData filters are not supported)
sortingStrategy Handled automatically
batchingStrategy Handled automatically; --isolated for batch size 1
shardingStrategy Handled automatically; --concurrency-limit caps the pool
retryStrategy --retry-quota-test-uncompleted, --no-retries
flakyTestStrategy --retry-quota-test-preventive, --retry-quota-test-reactive
poolingStrategy Handled automatically
testParserConfiguration / instrumentationArgs --instrumentation-arg
outputDir --output, or marathon-cloud download
screenRecordingPolicy Always on; per-test video is collected

The following features are specific to the self-hosted OSS version and are not available in Marathon Cloud:

  • ALL_SUCCESS execution mode
  • Custom device pooling rules
  • Count-based sharding
  • Random-order sorting
  • SSH remote workers
  • ADB server multiplicity
  • File push before batch
  • Custom screen recorder configuration
  • Local test parser