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Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

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Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#41

Post by whummer »

simonh wrote: post #28
shiftpgdn wrote: post #6

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.

I worked on a system called Quartz at Bank of America. It wasn't an AWS clone, but was targeting the same flexibility for the development and deployment of applications on 'programmable' infrastructure. The team that built it had done similar projects before at J. P. Morgan and Goldmans. It was a set of infrastructure and services all accessed through Python APIs, with YAML config, all stored in a single distributed…

Wow that sounds super interesting! If you can shoot us a message to info@localstack.cloud we'd love to chat and learn more about your journey!

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#42

Post by unethical_ban »

IceWreck wrote: post #13
shiftpgdn wrote: post #6

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 think it would not be impossible for a talented, well-funded group to pick the top 20% of AWS's services and then implement them with the top 80% of features, with an API-compatible layer.

Even "just" to emulate a single region with 3 AZs would be useful for testing and for prod for many people. I know of several large organizations that to this day haven't scaled their CI beyond one region.

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#43

Post by rkeene2 »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #6

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.

I built this a few times. The most current implementation is called CloudSeed, though I am trying to fundraise for an open source version (with a RedHat-like business model of support).

CloudSeed has been a key part of several >$1bn contracts for KnightPoint/Perspecta/Peraton, most recently DHS DCCO ($2.7bn).

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#44

Post by whummer »

DandyDev wrote: post #34
whummer wrote: 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 p…

Thanks for the feedback, great points. We're going to put a strong focus on our CI offering (both from a feature and pricing point of view) over the next couple of weeks/months.

For example, we're working on a new feature that will make it easy to snapshot the state of the LocalStack instance during and after each CI run, making the state "browsable" in the UI, and providing advanced insights and analytics into how the application stack and tests evolved over time.

We're also looking into alternative options for pricing - your point is well taken and will be considered for our roadmap. We definitely want to encourage testing frequently and on every commit - but I'd like to emphasize that our current CI offering is just a starting point, with lots more exciting features to come soon.. Thanks!

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#45

Post by mcintyre1994 »

jacurtis wrote: post #39
chrsig wrote: 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 a…

I’ve used localstack to mock things like Dynamo, S3 and Step Functions for dev/integration testing of lambdas built with SAM with great results. I actually didn’t know that SAM stubbed those out by default and haven’t used it for a while, but I found that if you point your AWS library at localstack:4566 then it’ll run it all against localstack correctly.

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#46

Post by belter »

IceWreck wrote: post #13
shiftpgdn wrote: post #6

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.

You can install DynamoDB locally although you will still miss the rest of the stack.

"Setting Up DynamoDB Local (Downloadable Version)" https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#47

Post by Hikikomori »

jacurtis wrote: post #39
chrsig wrote: 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 a…

They also support local stepfunctions.

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#48

Post by zokier »

chrsig wrote: 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…

I general I do agree, but otoh I'm not sure if local appliances are the solution. I believe AWS' vision is that development happens against real cloud resources, which seems neat on paper but to that to really work provisioning resources needs to be super smooth to easily create developer sandboxes. CloudFormation definitely is not it.

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#49

Post by whummer »

sverhagen wrote: post #40
chrsig wrote: 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…

+100

Another example to add to your list - the new AWS CLI v2:

> don't force me to download a 30MB binary with embedded Python interpreter baked in, please just give us a pip package instead!

;)

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#50

Post by jdreaver »

belter wrote: post #46
IceWreck wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can install DynamoDB locally although you will still miss the rest of the stack. "Setting Up DynamoDB Local (Downloadable Version)" https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...

> The downloadable version of DynamoDB is intended for development and testing purposes only. By comparison, the DynamoDB web service is a managed service with scalability, availability, and durability features that make it ideal for production use.

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