whummer

Right, no doubt that some customers required fully packaged solutions.

I guess it's generally hard to find the right balance, if you're catering to customers of different level of technical expertise/maturity.

(Btw, the previous comment was in reference to: https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/issues/4947)

Agreed, that's really stunning - seen the analogy of cloud as the "modern mainframe" come up more and more recently.

I guess the (business) reason is that the centralized computing model enables enormous economies of scale. (Makes perfect sense from an operations point of view.)

What it seems to miss in the current incarnation/iteration, though, is the "power of distribution" - leveraging the fact that local compute capabilities (especially during development/integration) can help reduce the cognitive load, increase the efficiency, and thereby reduce overall costs.

There seems to be a tendency to focus mostly on the operational aspects, rather than the overall end-to-end developer journey. What remains to be seen is whether future iterations of "the cloud" will do a better job of embracing the power of distributed and/or hybrid.

Absolutely - CDK under the covers generates CloudFormation templates, which deploy natively on LocalStack. Certainly a great use case for local dev&test - especially if you want quick feedback cycles, ability to destroy the stack immediately, etc.

There's also a "cdklocal" command line which should make it fairly easy to get started with local CDK development: https://github.com/localstack/aws-cdk-local

Touché!

Interesting! Staying lightweight and zero-dependency is certainly a good argument. Out of curiosity - which programming language(s) are you / your team developing in? Do you have a notion of how much (%) of your time, approximately, goes into maintaining the mocks - does it scale / pay off over time?

Yep, local Terraform testing is a great use case - we're seeing a lot of usage in this space. Here are some some pointers to get started with the provider configuration: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/aws/latest...

We'll soon publish some more details on the TF integration in the LocalStack docs...

Side note - similar to the *.tfstate file maintained by Terraform (storing metadata about resource deployment states), we're increasingly making use of persistence files (called "local cloud pods") that allow you to easily store the state of your LocalStack instance, share it with team members, keep track of changes over time, etc. Really nifty feature...

+100

Another example to add to your list - the new AWS CLI v2:

> don't force me to download a 30MB binary with embedded Python interpreter baked in, please just give us a pip package instead!

;)

Thanks for the feedback, great points. We're going to put a strong focus on our CI offering (both from a feature and pricing point of view) over the next couple of weeks/months.

For example, we're working on a new feature that will make it easy to snapshot the state of the LocalStack instance during and after each CI run, making the state "browsable" in the UI, and providing advanced insights and analytics into how the application stack and tests evolved over time.

We're also looking into alternative options for pricing - your point is well taken and will be considered for our roadmap. We definitely want to encourage testing frequently and on every commit - but I'd like to emphasize that our current CI offering is just a starting point, with lots more exciting features to come soon.. Thanks!

Wow that sounds super interesting! If you can shoot us a message to info@localstack.cloud we'd love to chat and learn more about your journey!

One of the main differentiators we see is that frameworks like SAM or Serverless are pretty opinionated about how your app should be defined/structured/implemented. These frameworks work absolutely great, as long as you 100% buy in to their way of doing things. This creates a certain lock-in effect, and may make it harder to switch to a different framework/approach later on.

LocalStack takes a different approach by working on the API emulation layer - hence making it easier to switch and integrate with various different application development frameworks.

Btw - there's also a Serverless plugin, as well as a "samlocal" command line - in case you'd like to give it a try:

https://github.com/localstack/serverless-localstack

https://github.com/localstack/aws-sam-cli-local

Yes, great point - you can define and deploy your resources to LocalStack using CloudFormation (either as YAML or JSON files). This makes it very easy to maintain and exchange stacks in a platform-neutral way.

Btw - we're also offering integrations for Terraform (https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/aws/latest...) and Pulumi (https://github.com/localstack/pulumi-local), among others.

Great question - we're working very closely with moto, in fact our team very actively contributes to the moto core on a regular basis.

The main differentiator is that moto is a Python library that mocks out / implements the AWS APIs, whereas we see LocalStack as a platform that aims to support the end-to-end development lifecycle for your cloud apps.

A lot of the work we do in LocalStack is to create a seamless dev experience in your local environment - providing local DNS integrations, persistence features, Lambda code mounting, CI integrations, transparent injection of "localhost" endpoints into AWS SDKs (e.g., for your Lambda functions), and much more. Also, today we already provide some fairly sophisticated integrations - e.g., our Athena API which allows you to run your SQL-like big data queries natively over the local S3 filesystem. This is out of scope for moto, but a big focus area for us.

Our aspiration is that you can take any (AWS) cloud app and deploy it natively to LocalStack - which is already the case in many scenarios, and improving on a daily basis.

Btw, we're currently working on revamping/polishing our docs with lots of more content and details - we'll push out an update to https://localstack.cloud/docs in the next couple of days!

Hi, we do have Azure on our roadmap - recently launched a beta program with a few selected customers. We'd love to learn more about your use case - if you're interested, please shoot us an email to info@localstack.cloud . Thanks!

Absolutely - couldn't agree more. This project would have never been possible without such an amazing community. Kudos to you all!

Hey all - LocalStack co-founder here. Great to see this article trending. :)

Happy for any additional suggestions and questions you may have. Looking forward to getting your feedback!

Hey - LocalStack founder here. Thanks for the feedback.

We're currently investing some time and resources on refactoring the code base to improve the performance. We have some improvements in the pipeline which we should be able to roll out within the next 1-2 weeks.

Performance (as well as general UX) is definitely high up on our priority list, and we'll continue to invest heavily in this area. Stay tuned!

Happy for any additional suggestions and questions you may have.

Awesome tool - looks great. Love the fact that it integrates nicely with tools like LocalStack.

Any more details on the planned features and future roadmap of Commandeer?

Keep up the good work!