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Comment by Lucasoato | Hacker News Reader

I always welcome warmly projects like these, the only problem is that unless there’s a strong community behind, founders tend to build companies around them, raise capital, then put useful functionalities behind paywalls (see localstack).

When I see that, it always reminds me of Steve Jobs’s quote: ”It’s not a product, it’s a feature”.

Aren’t cloud companies like AWS, Azure, GCP the first to be interested in providing their users a meaningful way to do test integrations of their products? Shouldn’t they provide them in the first place?

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It depends on the company. Azure provides local emulators for some of their products like CosmosDB and Azure Storage.

Depending on what your size and other things, sometimes it's just easier to have dev instances you test against. Like S3 emulator, you could download one of many and test it but unless your test suite is extensive, the costs against S3 test bucket would probably cost you .03 cents for assurances that everything will work against AWS. If that's breaking the bank at the company, you probably have bigger problems.

> Like S3 emulator, you could download one of many and test it but unless your test suite is extensive, the costs against S3 test bucket would probably cost you .03 cents

Not sure if your serious.

You picked the simplest service that isn't expensive at all to run. Have you tried with an RDS cluster for example, how does that work?

Does your integration test create a new cluster to use? That's slow to set up.

Does it use an existing one? Now you might have failures due to noisy neighbors and your cost will not be small.

And that's just RDS, as soon as it's not serverless, costs aren't trivial anymore.

I assume for RDS for integration testing, you could just use publicly available software. So stand up MySQL container if your RDS is MySQL. This is integration testing, not load testing so shared RDS in lowers would be fine as well. Noisy neighbors shouldn't be a big deal.

Again, while local cloud emulator is great for cost sensitive customers, at some point, you should test Dev against almost exact environment you will be running Prod on. If not, you are asking for eventual outage in Prod when some slightly different AWS thing bites you.

Your first paragraph "just use a MySQL container" and the second "test against what prod runs on", seem to contradict?

> If not, you are asking for eventual outage in Prod when some slightly different AWS thing bites you.

Exactly...

It depends on your tests and environments. MySQL container should be used for integration and CI/CD testing if you are cost sensitive. Dev or Staging should be end to end testing against AWS RDS.

Whole point is this stuff is for those who think running Dev RDS is too expensive.

You’d think that but it doesn’t seem to be the case. I do a lot of offline development and the only way it used to be possible was localstack but that’s AWS only. The open source community is the only interested party, it seems. Thankfully, there’s a lot of contribution happening in this space. Because I have need, I make a lot of my own contributions. I’m doing full stack cloud development against GCP without ever leaving my device.

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