What's it actually do? "Run all the same services as your production stack, isolated but directly on your Mac. No Docker, no virtual machines, no hassles" is vague AF.
The premise of running Docker for Mac or other VMs as a development environment is usually so you can run the exact same set of services in development as you run in production. Isolated meaning you can delete the stack, rebuild it, start it up on another machine without any fear of it being affected by macOS updates. With D4M or VMs this is at the expense of not running it directly on your Mac natively, but rather inside the VM.
So to answer your question ("What's it actually do?"), it runs the same services as you might run in docker, with similar upsides (separated from the OS, rebuildable, shareable etc) but without the downsides.
Many developers have experienced first-hand the hassles involved in running D4M or a VM for development. However, those solutions really seem to work for some, so if that's you, Indigo is probably not of interest :)
Anyhow, thanks for the feedback, and if you can suggest anything I could/should say on the site specifically, please do!
Different Ports != Isolation..
But hey, marketing.
There are other ways to achieve process isolation in a Unix environment without relying on Docker or virtualization.
This has a number of benefits including protecting sensitive files/info in your home folder from rogue dependencies and allowing you to easily toss the dev environment into a black hole once it's no longer needed. If IndigoStack somehow implements isolation using chroot or other MacOS/Darwin equivalents it should be explained on the web page. Otherwise I think the marketing text is misleading:
> Bare metal. With the best of virtualized.
Edit:
I do like the idea of something like IndigoStack though. Being able to describe a dev environment programatically/declaratively and then having something take care of setting that up is nice. If you're a pure MacOS shop then something platform specific like this is probably an okay solution.
I run databases however in Docker on my Mac.
And even if you think setting up a "sane development environment" is simple, it gets much more complicated as you add additional languages and versions of those languages, and their underlying frameworks, etc. For example if you look at NodeJS alone: we have things like nvm to switch between Node release versions because you'll often have different projects relying on different versions of Node. Or you could just use Docker and it's baked in, basically.
What if someone's dev environment requires a running Redis server, PostgreSQL, and MinIO? And what if you need to keep those instances free of cruft from other projects? Hey, you know what works for that? Docker!
Or what if you need to mock several AWS services locally, because you don't want to be paying for actual AWS or polluting other environments while working on something? Hey, you know what works for that? Docker!