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Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

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Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#71

Post by ragona »

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 think this misunderstands the hard part of running AWS. You're paying for the software, sure. What you're really paying for is the hundreds of oncall engineers supporting you at all times, and the culture of ensuring that those services keep working.

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#72

Post by kortilla »

NathanKP wrote: post #68
kortilla wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they won't solve the problem of lock in Conflating lock in to an open source tool with lock in to a vendor who you literally have to keep paying money to survive is a shitty tactic used by companies like Amazon. Using open stack absolutely solves the problem of lock in from a business perspective. You can’t be cancelled, the price can’t be changed, etc.

I legitimately wonder how many people feel free from lock in after they finish paying $75k to Canonical for a 12 node OpenStack "private cloud build" ( https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/d4766546-Private-Cloud-Build_Da... ), not to mention ongoing support bills and billing for addons "starting at $25k". Just because something is open source does not mean your org will actually have the expertise to be successful at running…

> I legitimately wonder how many people feel free from lock in after they finish paying $75k to Canonical for a 12 node OpenStack "private cloud build"

Here’s the part where it’s not lock-in. We stopped paying for support from Redhat when we got big enough that our own SRE expertise to run our own open stack cloud.

You know what the impact was on our applications running on it? Absolutely nothing.

How much do you pay Canonical to use grep every month? Inexperienced developers have just been conditioned by cloud providers to think that an IaaS platform must cost something in payments per month to some tech company. It does not.

This is no different than Windows vs Linux on servers. I can’t wait until 20 years from now when all of the proprietary shit looks ridiculous in hindsight.

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#73

Post by kevinsundar »

ragona wrote: post #71
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 think this misunderstands the hard part of running AWS. You're paying for the software, sure. What you're really paying for is the hundreds of oncall engineers supporting you at all times, and the culture of ensuring that those services keep working.

As an Amazon engineer who frequently goes oncall, this is Amazon’s true competitive advantage.

The company works because every night there’s 1000s of engineers sleeping with a pager by their head.

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#74

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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.

Need more details. Matching AWS service for service would be overkill I imagine, so what services does this need to have. Is hardware virtualisation is must-have.

The way I made systems/applications before AWS existed was to create bootable images. I could already use a hypervisor, Xen, because the OS fully supported both guest and host, all virtualisation modes, before Linux did, and before AWS existed. But because I am not a hosting provider I saw little need for virtualisation. The OS I used also had "unikernel" capability, before Docker, etc. existed. As it happened, this inexpensive, self-determination was not to be the future, instead we got "the cloud". Sharing servers with other "tenants". Less expensive for the hosting provider, but more expensive and more limited for the subscriber. No argument, the "limited" part has improved since then, but it is still expensive (for continuous use that is, spot pricing was a neat benefit of "the cloud").

Anyway, I "deploy" images to "local bare metal" which is a laptop, RPi, or some other smaller form factor. I can use unikernel for some kernel drivers in userspace. Basic filesystem is embedded in the kernel, and larger filesystem is on the USB stick filesystem in compressed format. Updates are easy enough. I put two kernels on the USB stick, one is the running kernel and the other is the update kernel. Same for the larger filesystem which may contain servers and configuration files. Can update or go back to last working kernel/configuration by selecting one or the other in the boot menu/renaming the larger compressed filesystem.

Here is someone running a search engine out of his living room. AKAIK, his setup survived a sustained HN thundering herd, hug of death without a hiccup.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28552805

The expense of AWS is an obvious point of discussion but another one not mentioned here is control. When I create images for bare metal I do not need to jump through any hoops as I would in order to create an image that will run on AWS. Nor do I need to fiddle with all the AWS knobs. There are no silly marketing names for every program I run. I know the system I am creating as well as I know the OS and the software I choose. That is much better than how well I know every aspect of AWS which just gets more and more complex every year. AWS documentation is as cringeworthy as it it is voluminous. The ever-increasing complexity of AWS, including the "tooling", is, IMO, How To Create Lock-In 101

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#75

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#76

Post by zimbatm »

NathanKP wrote: post #68
kortilla wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they won't solve the problem of lock in Conflating lock in to an open source tool with lock in to a vendor who you literally have to keep paying money to survive is a shitty tactic used by companies like Amazon. Using open stack absolutely solves the problem of lock in from a business perspective. You can’t be cancelled, the price can’t be changed, etc.

I legitimately wonder how many people feel free from lock in after they finish paying $75k to Canonical for a 12 node OpenStack "private cloud build" ( https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/d4766546-Private-Cloud-Build_Da... ), not to mention ongoing support bills and billing for addons "starting at $25k". Just because something is open source does not mean your org will actually have the expertise to be successful at running…

I'm sure you can find other OpenStack professionals that are willing to manage your Ubuntu OpenStack deployment.

Of course every solution costs something. Lock-in means that there is no other choice, or that the cost to switch is so steep that it becomes prohibitive to do so.

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#77

Post by temp_praneshp »

NathanKP wrote: post #68
kortilla wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they won't solve the problem of lock in Conflating lock in to an open source tool with lock in to a vendor who you literally have to keep paying money to survive is a shitty tactic used by companies like Amazon. Using open stack absolutely solves the problem of lock in from a business perspective. You can’t be cancelled, the price can’t be changed, etc.

I legitimately wonder how many people feel free from lock in after they finish paying $75k to Canonical for a 12 node OpenStack "private cloud build" ( https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/d4766546-Private-Cloud-Build_Da... ), not to mention ongoing support bills and billing for addons "starting at $25k". Just because something is open source does not mean your org will actually have the expertise to be successful at running…

> 12 node OpenStack

I share your disdain(?) for openstack, but the 12 node count there is minimum I think (to deploy the control plane). You can likely add a reasonable number of hypervisors at no cost.

(I think I'm correct based on the table in the last page of your doc, but happy to be corrected).

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#78

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#79

Post by whummer »

kongin wrote: post #69
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.

It's kind of stunning that starting with fully open technologies we build another closed mainframe on top of it. All that's old is new again.

Agreed, that's really stunning - seen the analogy of cloud as the "modern mainframe" come up more and more recently.

I guess the (business) reason is that the centralized computing model enables enormous economies of scale. (Makes perfect sense from an operations point of view.)

What it seems to miss in the current incarnation/iteration, though, is the "power of distribution" - leveraging the fact that local compute capabilities (especially during development/integration) can help reduce the cognitive load, increase the efficiency, and thereby reduce overall costs.

There seems to be a tendency to focus mostly on the operational aspects, rather than the overall end-to-end developer journey. What remains to be seen is whether future iterations of "the cloud" will do a better job of embracing the power of distributed and/or hybrid.

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#80

Post by jpgvm »

itake wrote: post #63
surfer7837 wrote: post #56

I prefer mocking my AWS calls, so much more lightweight and means exert developer doesn’t have to install local stack

Do you mock for local dev too?

I do. But I also primarily use JVM which means either high quality mocks are already available or it's easy to mock them out using Mockito or creating a fake implementation if I want.
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