Single Appium server to handle tests to multiple Android instances in parallel

I have many Android containers running in the cloud which I want to control remotely, in parallel, through Appium. However it’s not obvious how I can use a single Appium server (which can easily be scaled later on) to route commands through to an individual Android instance.

Right now I have a Docker image with ADB and Appium installed which basically (1) connects to the ADB daemon on the Android container and (2) launch the Appium server

#!/bin/sh
adb connect "$1"
appium

Then I launch one of these Docker containers per each Android instance that I want to control. But this is not very easy to scale and there is still a lot of work in managing used ports (when port forwarding Appium’s 4723 port to a unique port for each Android instance).

What is the canonical way to do this in the Appium ecosystem?

[simoreira]

Any reason to not use Selenium Grid for this? You can then automate the capabilities generation and manage the ports through it.

[mykola-mokhnach]

It will anyway be necessary to manage ports/devices acquisition. A testing session will be just using the particular device udid, that is passed to it. It does not care whether this device is already used by other instances.