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Comment by tedmiston | Hacker News Reader

Ehh... once your systems use more than a few pieces of cloud infrastructure / SaaS / PaaS / external dependencies / etc, purely local development of the system is just not possible.

There are some (limited) simulators / emulators / etc available and whatnot for some services, but running a full platform that has cloud dependencies on a local machine is often just not possible.

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The answer (IMHO) is to not use services that make it impossible to develop locally, unless you can trivially mock them; the benefits of such services aren't worth it if they result in a system that is inherently untestable with an environment that's inherently unreproducible.

(I can go on a rant about AWS Lambda, and how if they'd used a standardized interface like FastCGI it would make local testing trivial, but they won't do that because they need vendor lock-in...)

Yeah, ideally you'd only use the ones which are just managed versions of software you can run locally. Stuff like managed databases and redis.

Agreed. And stay away from proprietary cloud services that lock you into a specific cloud provider. Otherwise, you'll end up like one of those companies that still does everything on MS SQL Server and various Oracle byproducts despite rising costs because of decisions made many years ago.

Amen

Awesome. you just cost your company $500K in salaries for people to maintain databases, networks, storage, servers and a bunch of other stuff Google/AWS already do much better than you.

How lucky you are that management pays you to pursue your hobbies!

Spinning up services for local dev is still in spirit. As long as it's something you can do is isolation from other devs/users it serves the function.

Forcing developers to deal with mocks right from the beginning is critical in my opinion. Unit testing as part of your CI/CD flow needs to be a first priority rather than something that gets thought of later on. Testing locally should be synonymous with running your unit test suite.

Doing your integration testing deployed to a non-production cloud environment is always necessary but should never be a requirement for doing development locally.

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