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Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

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Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#31

I’ve been saying for a couple of years whoever builds a tool to one click deploy an AWS alike to run on local bare metal has built the next billion dollar a year company. I know of a lot of big shops that are desperate to get out of the cloud due to 7-8 figure AWS bills but their software and engineering is too tightly wound into AWS tooling.

Which will never happen you child

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#32

You can also create resources using a YAML file, I found that feature extremely useful!

Yes, great point - you can define and deploy your resources to LocalStack using CloudFormation (either as YAML or JSON files). This makes it very easy to maintain and exchange stacks in a platform-neutral way.

Btw - we're also offering integrations for Terraform (https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/aws/latest...) and Pulumi (https://github.com/localstack/pulumi-local), among others.

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#34
post #10

Hey all - LocalStack co-founder here. Great to see this article trending. :) Happy for any additional suggestions and questions you may have. Looking forward to getting your feedback!

Localstack Pro looks quite nice and comprehensive, but the CI pricing seems to really discourage proper continuous integration best practices. At 10 cents per run you're encouraging developers to run their CI pipelines as little as possible, while ideally you'd run CI on each commit and you'd commit often, probably 10s is times a day. In that case Localstack Pro for CI would get costly very quickly.

Why not have CI pricing per project/repo. Regardless of how often it runs.

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#35

How does Localstack compare to SAM and Serverless local? Is it easier to use? Have a couple lambda services backed by API GW that I’d like to have a better dev env for.

One of the main differentiators we see is that frameworks like SAM or Serverless are pretty opinionated about how your app should be defined/structured/implemented. These frameworks work absolutely great, as long as you 100% buy in to their way of doing things. This creates a certain lock-in effect, and may make it harder to switch to a different framework/approach later on.

LocalStack takes a different approach by working on the API emulation layer - hence making it easier to switch and integrate with various different application development frameworks.

Btw - there's also a Serverless plugin, as well as a "samlocal" command line - in case you'd like to give it a try:

https://github.com/localstack/serverless-localstack

https://github.com/localstack/aws-sam-cli-local

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#36
post #4

i wish aws...and to be honest, most cloud providers put more effort into the development experience. they have local dynamo, but i believe that's the only official appliance they provide. I think it's especially necessary for the proprietary products -- dynamo being a great example. I'll take a moment to call out snowflake for this as well -- it's really frustrating to not be able to quickly (within milliseconds) and…

It isn’t what you are asking for, but I was a bit surprised/happy to discover that the Ruby AWS SDK has a good stub client implementation: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/advanced-client-stubb...

I found it useful when updating some existing old ruby scripts we had. (Of course they had little to no testing before that.)

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#37
post #35

How does Localstack compare to SAM and Serverless local? Is it easier to use? Have a couple lambda services backed by API GW that I’d like to have a better dev env for.

One of the main differentiators we see is that frameworks like SAM or Serverless are pretty opinionated about how your app should be defined/structured/implemented. These frameworks work absolutely great, as long as you 100% buy in to their way of doing things. This creates a certain lock-in effect, and may make it harder to switch to a different framework/approach later on. LocalStack takes a different approach by w…

Awesome! I’ll give it a try

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#38

I’ve been saying for a couple of years whoever builds a tool to one click deploy an AWS alike to run on local bare metal has built the next billion dollar a year company. I know of a lot of big shops that are desperate to get out of the cloud due to 7-8 figure AWS bills but their software and engineering is too tightly wound into AWS tooling.

But AWS is huge. They employ thousands of engineers. Granted most of the complexity is due to its huge huge scale, but still it has too many features to do what youre asking. And then there are AWS exclusives like DynamoDB. Yes there are open source public/private cloud alternatives like OpenStack but they won't solve the problem of lock in and you'd still have to change all your tooling.

I mean the value is really implementing AWS’s API surface area in a single control-plane overtop of the usual on-prem tooling. K8s is kinda getting there but is too narrow in scope I think for what people actually want.

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#39
post #4

i wish aws...and to be honest, most cloud providers put more effort into the development experience. they have local dynamo, but i believe that's the only official appliance they provide. I think it's especially necessary for the proprietary products -- dynamo being a great example. I'll take a moment to call out snowflake for this as well -- it's really frustrating to not be able to quickly (within milliseconds) and…

In addition to local dynamo, they also have local AWS Lambda execution via AWS SAM (Serverless Application Model).

You invoke it via the command line

`sam local invoke [OPTIONS] [FUNCTION_LOGICAL_ID]`

Behind the scenes it is running an attached docker container and feeding you the output. I found that it works actually very well and mimics the cloud invocation environment perfectly.

The problem is that it stubs out any other services you run. So if your Lambda adds something to SQS or SNS or SES or S3 or anything else, it simply stubs those out. So advanced functions do get difficult to test locally. But This Localstack emulator may solve those problems (but I haven't used it yet)

Details: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/serverless-application-model/lat...

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#40
post #4

i wish aws...and to be honest, most cloud providers put more effort into the development experience. they have local dynamo, but i believe that's the only official appliance they provide. I think it's especially necessary for the proprietary products -- dynamo being a great example. I'll take a moment to call out snowflake for this as well -- it's really frustrating to not be able to quickly (within milliseconds) and…

It frustrates me how they always go for the biggest common denominator there, the lowest level shared by everyone, but what's hardly used by professional users: don't let me download a jar file, please give me Maven coordinates. Don't tell me how to click in the console to get an EC2 instance, please give me an example Terraform snippet. Don't just show me how AWS CLI returns a blob of JSON when I assume role, please tell me how to use aws-mfa properly. I understand and respect their hands off approach to these more opinionated tools. But ergo, I tend to skip over the Amazon properties when finding what I need in the search results!

PS: Localstack is awesome! Also in combination with Testcontainers.

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