esting internal systems with Sauce Labs requires that our service is able to establish a connection. Some companies accomplish this by whitelisting our external IP addresses. However, we recommend instead that you use Sauce Connect, for these reasons:
Configurability
Sauce Connect provides many tools designed to improve the testing experience, from selective traffic routing to bandwidth restriction.
Each Sauce Connect instance can be assigned different network proxies, run on different hosts, allocated to different users and allowed access to different systems under test. This allows infrastructure teams great control and flexibility over system access.
Whitelisting provides no controls over which systems can be accessed by which users; Anyone with the correct URL can access any service.
Portability
Sauce Connect can be used in any part of your corporate infrastructure, with relatively minimal setup. It allows customers to test systems in different environments, different locations and different physical hosts. With a flexible Sauce Connect setup, a developer can run tests on their local machine, their staging service, their build server, and anywhere else required.
Whitelisting, in comparison, requires different routes and URLs for each environment under test. This places a maintenance burden on the networking team and leads to configuration problems for testers.
Reliability & Ease of Maintenance
Once Sauce Connect is running, the only maintenance is occasional updates of the software itself. Sauce Connect can be set up for multiple corporate users, and multiple systems under test, at the same time.
With Sauce Connect, our support team can provide greater assistance debugging connectivity and reliability problems, thanks to improved logging and network tracking.
Sauce Connect's underlying network tools improve reliability over bad network connections.
Security
Sauce Labs' service operates from a wide range of IP addresses. Any of these addresses may be allocated to any test environment or Sauce Labs customer at any time.
When whitelisting, this means any Sauce Labs customer could conceivably send requests to your system under test, and your network infrastructure would allow it. Whitelisting provides no tools for time-based access controls or easy disconnection.
By terminating the Sauce Connect client, the connection between our service and your infrastructure is severed. Sauce Connect thus allows fine-grained control of access.