Selenium Grid is a very useful approach for large organizations in need of a robust and wide offering of testing scenarios. However, it can also become a burden: maintenance can become complex and might require considerable investment in hardware, software, resources, and personnel.

With this in mind, companies such as Sauce Labs and BrowserStack provide Selenium Grid services in the cloud. A testing team will only need to redirect their automation scripts to their service of their choice. Some of the advantages of these type services include the following:

• The testing team can focus solely on designing, writing, and executing automation scripts. The Grid and Nodes where the tests will run against are created and maintained by the third-party provider.
• There is no need to concern about maintenance tasks (keeping OSes and browsers updated, for example) of the Selenium Grid and Selenium Nodes.
• In most cases, cost reductions. The organization no longer needs to spend money in operating system licenses, hardware, or virtualization environments.
• Diagnose features that allow us to take screenshots or videos to identify failures during a test execution.
• Access to log results.

On the other hand, a few disadvantages of these services include the following:

• Test execution time can increase due to a bigger latency between the browser used to execute the test and the system under test. Keep in mind that the browser is running somewhere in the cloud, and probably the system under test is far away from it; therefore, it is important to have well-tuned tests (for example, with explicit tests) to overcome this downside.
• If the system under test is not publicly accessible, a VPN tunnel needs to be established between the cloud where the remote Selenium Grid is running and your company's network. In many cases, this is not a major issue, but if you are working at a company with high security restrictions, this can become a relevant obstacle.

If you are interested in using a Selenium Grid third-party provider, it is wise to check in advance their offered features, services limitations, costs, and documentation. Most of them provide free trials, so you can make an informed decision.