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Hacker News Hacker NewsI currently work with several AWS serverless stacks that are challenging or even impossible to integration test locally. While Localstack provide a decent solution, it seems like a service that AWS should offer to enhance the developer experience. They’d also be in the best position to keep it current.
The aws endpoint coverage is impressive for moto [1], which my team almost migrated to, but we liked our support contract with LocalStack.
- I'm not sure this kind of product is really a foot in the door to create new customers. Someone not willing to create an actual account because they have no money or they just don't want to put their card details is not someone who's going to become a 6 figures per year customer, which is the level to be noticed by those providers.
- The free tier of AWS is actually quite generous. For my own needs I spend less than $10/year total spread around dozens of accounts.
- If one wants to learn AWS, they MUST learn that there are no hard spend limits, and the only way to actually learn it, is to be bitten by it as early as possible. It's better to overspend $5 at the beginning of the journey than to overspend $5k when going to prod.
- The main interest of local cloud is actually to make things easier and iterating faster, because you don't focus on all the security layer. Since everything is local, focus on using the services, period. Meanwhile, if you wanted to rely on actual dev accounts, you need to first make sure that everything is secure. With local cloud you can skip all this. But then, if you decide to go live, you have to fix this security debt and it most often than not break things that "work on my computer".
- Localstack has the actual support of AWS, that's why they have so much features and are able to follow the releases of the services. I doubt this FOSS alternative will have it.
If you want to use that for unit testing, then I think it would be better to mock the calls to AWS services. That way you test only your implementation, in an environment you control.
If you want to use that for local development, then I think it would be better to provision a test environment (using Terraform or any other IaC tool). That way you don't run the risk of a bug slipping into prod because the emulator has a different behaviour than the real service.
Although I love localstack and am grateful for what they have done, I always thought that an open community-driven solution would be much more suitable and opens a lot of doors for AWS engineers to contribute back. I’m certain that it’s on their best interest to do so (specially as many of their popular products have local versions)
It’s a no-brainer to me as AI adoption continues to increase: local-first integration testing is a must and teams that are equipped to do so will be ahead of everyone else
Anyway, do anyone know if there're similar stuff but for gcp? So far https://github.com/goccy/bigquery-emulator helped me a lot in emulating bigquery behaviour, but I cant find emulator for the whole gcp environment.
No pull-requests, no real issues, it smells like it was auto-generated which is disappointing. Makes it harder to trust if you're going to test with "real data", how do we know it won't be sent elsewhere?
At that speed you can treat it as disposable: fresh instance per test run, no shared state, no flaky tests from leftover S3 objects. that was never practical with LocalStack cold start
Hiding bad system design behind another docker container will not push you to the right direction, but the opposite.
In addition this is def vide-coded (50k loc in one week) so I don't see how can one trust this even.