Live data from Hacker News

Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

github.com

81–90 of 132 posts

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#81
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do that for general customer support instead of hiring in different time zones?

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#82

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 would absolutely love reading you blogging in details about this. It's a lost art, and one I've ever been good at. I want to lately, but people like you are always undercover and don't document their knowledge. :(

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#83

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.

> 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.

It's the same thing. You're paying for engineers to work with a service or you're paying for a service.

See how your comment ages in five years with kubernetes.

I've absolutely seen disasters with open source that bleed companies dry. Openstack is a great example.

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#84
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! ;)

I’ve been on both sides of this and some consumers are fine but some have no idea how to consume or initial setup is so broken, this is much easier

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#86
It's impressive what Localstack has been able to do to keep up with AWS.

However for my own projects, we consider local development like this an anti-pattern. IaC tools like Terraform/CDK/SST make it easy to spin up environments for each developer in the cloud. This may sound crazy at first but would recommend giving it a shot.

If you're fully taking advantage of managed AWS services the best development environment is running everything in AWS. There's definitely some friction but you reduce the "was working on my machine but not in production" situations.

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#87
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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! ;)

I’ve been on both sides of this and some consumers are fine but some have no idea how to consume or initial setup is so broken, this is much easier

Right, no doubt that some customers required fully packaged solutions.

I guess it's generally hard to find the right balance, if you're catering to customers of different level of technical expertise/maturity.

(Btw, the previous comment was in reference to: https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/issues/4947)

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#88

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.

Not necessarily if your end goal is to be a unicorn. You can get a lot of investment for that.

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#89
post #58

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

Interesting! Staying lightweight and zero-dependency is certainly a good argument. Out of curiosity - which programming language(s) are you / your team developing in? Do you have a notion of how much (%) of your time, approximately, goes into maintaining the mocks - does it scale / pay off over time?

[deleted]

Re: Localstack – Local AWS Emulator

#90
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! ;)

aws cli v2 is such a sad story long live awscli1!
Post reply on HN