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Comment by abraxas | Hacker News Reader

> You also therefore can’t truly run Firebase locally.

To me this is just incredible. As an old timer who learned the ropes in the late eighties it never crossed my mind (what with computers always getting faster) that we would once again face the situation that developers can't run their software locally. It's like a bloody throwback to the sixties and the days of punchcards and timesharing systems. Thanks but no thanks!

It's such a friction factor that all other benefits of the platform get overshadowed by this. It's the same reason I'm vehemently opposed to my team using AWS Lambdas for anything non-trivial. And no, SAM is not the answer here.

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> It's the same reason I'm vehemently opposed to my team using AWS Lambdas for anything non-trivial. And no, SAM is not the answer here.

I’ve had to start using Lambda at work and this is my biggest problem. Waiting minutes to see if it was a typo or if there’s a larger problem is terrible. I miss Docker.

SST (https://sst.dev/) has been a game-changer for me, it makes serverless bearable.

Violently agreeing.

We really need completely open source stack for the applications themselves, and few enough deps that they can run and be debugged locally. Not only that, but one shouldn't need to provision a cluster and configure certs just to run some business logic that's unrelated to infrastructure.

Honestly curious, do you have examples or thoughts of what this might look like? What is the core primitive upon which you want to build that is zero config but highly scalable?

Tbh I don't have the experience to give advice or reviews.

That said, check out Nats.io. It's basically just a messaging system but it's beautifully abstracted, horizontally scalable and runs locally from a small binary. It largely removes the need for much middleware like load balancers. They've also recently added persistence features for streams and KV stores.

It doesn't solve every problem but I do think a message system is a very good core abstraction to build other things on top of.

We had this in the early 2000s. It was called J2EE application servers. All external dependencies were specified in terms of interfaces. Granted a lot of them were needlessly convoluted but the premise was good.

I had a customer, big "big" database >10TB used just internally, they paid 1000's of dollars monthly for "cloud", installed 2 redundant server's with backup's snapshot's just everything. Performance increased 5 time's, cost decreased 10 time's reliability increased 2 times (not a really reliable internet access there) the system is running now since 7 years with nearly no intervention. Cloud is not the answer to anything...but to some (workloads) it is...the right tool for the work....

While I feel the same way about local dev, I think the industry as a whole is indifferent.

Every place I've worked that's adopted into AWS/Azure gave up on running apps locally. And everything becomes harder because of it.

And now there's a push to not even run your editor locally - the next trend is your whole development experience happening in the browser connected to a cloud dev environment.

Most of firebase’s backend services have local emulators. Some even use the same codebase as production (real-time database). We’re also rewriting the functions emulator to use the functions-framework like prod (our emulator predated functions framework).

They don’t emulate very well, however.

In the 2 instances where I really needed emulation, they completely failed for me. In one scenario, I needed to run a cloud trigger upon writing an object to storage. Nope, that doesn’t work.

In the second scenario, I wanted to replicate our dev database to local so I could run locally with the same conditions, rather than an empty store. Spent hours on that before giving up.

I’m not aware of any feature that allows you to load a db dump into the database emulator, though it’s two simple curl commands if this dev database is small enough. The storage emulator does trigger the functions emulator though and has for years.

correct me if i'm wrong, you can run lambdas locally whit firecracker, lost all the benefits of serverless (you are self-hosting) but you can do it if you need it.

Lambdas are run on Firecracker, but firecracker is just a runtime, it doesn’t include the rest of the FaaS stack Lambda provides.

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