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Comment by iaaan | Hacker News Reader

I evangelized localstack at my company a while back, but as we integrated it deeper into our CI test runs we started running into more and more things they don't support, and it feels impossible to get any attention from their support/devs despite being paying customers.

Their Cloud Pod and ephemeral instance features in particular feel pretty half-baked and not very useful at the moment.

Fun tangent: it's pretty easy to write a crack for the pro version; we actually used that for about a month as a pilot to confirm that it would do what we needed it to.

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I used some small parts of localstack a long time back for some integration tests. I haven't kept up with what it does.

Looking at their pricing tiers, it seems that their paid product now a cloud based service, or partly cloud based.

I don't really see why you would pay to use a cloud based AWS emulator, instead of just using a real AWS account.

I too was excited about the idea originally but then started realizing that they will have an increasingly untenable service area to try and maintain and mimic and it was just never going to work out.

It does seem like LLMs might make that a real proposition; of course, after these commercial enterprises steal copyright, copyleft and open source code, and the tooling gets good enough to download their cars, a new legion of DMCA lawyers and lobbies will be unleashed.

Prep yourself though for that napster bloom, it'll be here shortly.

Agree but still a lot of surface area

Yeah I remember looking at it when I started a job that was all in on AWS and quickly realised that it would be much better to just stick with real AWS and minimise my dependence on niche services.

Which services weren't supported in your use case? Currently with our enterprise contract we use all the usual suspects:

AppConfig, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Kinesis streams, RDS/Aurora with innodb engine, S3, SecretsManager, SNS, and SQS. I'm probably forgetting a few, but we haven't hit anything unsupported (yet.)

I also haven't touched any pod stuff and have no plans to. Probably just luck of the draw we didn't hit any holes or issues, but we tend not to use any esoteric features in AWS land.

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