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Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run
- garrettjoecox 7mo ago"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"
- stanac 7mo agoSo is local stack dead? Is this situation the lesser evil? Or is it not dead and we will see a villain rise? Edit: I see now, they have commercial offerings: https://www.localstack.cloud/pricing https://www.localstack.cloud/pricing I am not sure if my corp will be willing to pay or tell us to find something else, but I use it everyday, our integration tests depend on local stack.
- computomatic 7mo agoIMO, the trajectory was set back when they removed the option for monthly payments. Minimum US$450 to play made it a non-starter for my projects (even with commercial ambitions). They changed this just as I started to integrate (~2024, I think) so I kept to the free capabilities. Have been waiting for the other show to drop and here we are. Edit: looks like they’ve reintroduced monthly billing within the last few months. I guess that’s a sort of win, even if not for the OSS community. But I’d still be reluctant to get into bed with them at this stage.
- ksajadi 7mo agoComplete coincidence but today I was looking for an AWS mock for E2E tests. Not the whole AWS footprint but just a few services and looked at LocalStack for the first time. It took Claude to put together a service (with web interface and everything) for those 2 services 15 mins. I’m not claiming my experience is translated universally but perhaps if your core competency is something like LocalStack you need to think about alternative business ideas.
- autism-kills 7mo ago[flagged]
- supriyo-biswas 7mo agoWell LLMs are trained on code like those from Localstack, and a lot of them can be emulated to first order as CRUD operations, so its rather unsurprising. It does mean that things do become difficult for pure tech SaaS businesses like this one, and as also seen with Tailwind.
- LunaSea 7mo agoHow do you know that Claude's moc matches the AWS API behaviour perfectly?
- matt_callmann 7mo agoWhat are the alternatives? I primarily used it for S3 and SQS emulation.
- kadoban 7mo agoI haven't evaluated it deeply yet, but I saw https://github.com/hectorvent/floci https://github.com/hectorvent/floci
- switchbak 7mo agoIn my first few hours: - it failed with Pekko due to not returning version information properly - it doesn't support range requests in S3 (!) This project is 8 days old. It did support most of my workflow, but ... I don't get the warmest of fuzzies relying on something so brand new. But here we are in the age of vibe coded AI replacements, what a time to be alive.
- pfix 7mo agoI've fiddled around with https://docs.getmoto.org/en/latest/docs/server_mode.html https://docs.getmoto.org/en/latest/docs/server_mode.html It didn't support the one thing I wanted but it was so easy to find the right place in the code, I was happy. Never got to continue it though or turn it into a PR
- luis_cho 7mo agoI am about to test this one http://docs.getmoto.org/en/latest/index.html http://docs.getmoto.org/en/latest/index.html
- cyberax 7mo agoFor S3 emulation, I'm using rustfs. It's very compact and fast to run, and you can just start it with `docker run` inside tests if you don't want to set up a full integration test harness. I used an SQS-on-top-of-Redis emulation before, but I can't recommended it now (no updates for 6 years).
- bytK7 7mo agoI haven't used this yet, but there's also https://github.com/robotocore/robotocore https://github.com/robotocore/robotocore. It came up on HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420619.
- iaaan 7mo agoI 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.
- redwood 7mo agoI 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.
- cyanydeez 7mo agoIt 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.
- redwood 7mo agoAgree but still a lot of surface area
- jamesfinlayson 7mo agoYeah 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.
- drzaiusx11 7mo agoWhich 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.
- tecleandor 7mo agoThey still have linked their OpenCollective account, where they have raised $10K and still have a balance of $5K. [0] It's not a lot in the great scheme of things, but, have they been using a platform that's seemingly built for communities and open source to bootstrap their business? Because this is not a 'open core' situation. They just closed the repo and ran away. If they had that idea all along, I feel like it hasn't be very, let's say, ethical. -- 0: https://opencollective.com/localstack#category-ABOUT
- armchairhacker 7mo ago“Open core” is when part of the product is open-source and part is private. Was a significant part of the product private before this announcement? If not, someone can fork the repo and immediately launch a competitor (FOSS or paid). (Technically even if so, except it wouldn’t be immediate, and if they’d have to re-implement too much, it would be easier to start from scratch.)
- thefreeman 7mo agoyes, there were a large number of AWS products and features that were only available with a subscription
- thayne 7mo agoYes there were significant portions that were proprietary before this, including support for some services. The parts that were open source might still be worth forking, but you would probably need to change every occurrence of the name to avoid trademark issues.
- hungryhobbit 7mo agoWait, so a company shared their work with the public for however long, then decided to leave what was shared up ... but stop sharing ... and you're upset?!? They did everything properly by the rules of OSS, decided it wasn't in their best interest to keep doing OSS, and left all their code available, as required by OSS. They were a textbook good participant. Meanwhile, 99% of companies never open source anything: why aren't you complaining about how "unethical" they are?
- piladelpia 7mo ago[dead]
- Achiyacohen 7mo ago[dead]
- jayofdoom 7mo agoMore reason to run your infrastructure using open source software in your own datacenter. OpenStack has been around for closing in on two decades, running clouds and being mostly governance-drama-free. It's not surprising that a proprietary ecosystem built on open source software locked up behind a gate doesn't make a worthwhile ecosystem for building open source tooling against.
- hrmtst93837 7mo ago[flagged]
- jayofdoom 7mo agoI'm saying not that OpenStack can replace LocalStack, but instead that LocalStack, by building a project on top of proprietary APIs, set themselves up to fail.
- waterTanuki 7mo agoLocalStack built a mock of proprietary APIs, not on top. There's a distinct difference.
- UltraSane 7mo agoOpenStack is one of the most complicated platforms in existence and finding suitably talented admins is very hard.
- jayofdoom 7mo agoThis is true, sadly -- but the documentation exists and community is friendly to those who wanna build those skills. It's extremely difficult to build something the size of OpenStack without making it so configurable that operating it needs a decoder ring. I'm doing everything I can in Ironic to make it more friendly and flexible out of the box, but it's a difficult problem to solve. I always tell people: OpenStack can do almost anything you want... if you can configure it to do so :).
- the_mitsuhiko 7mo agoDid localstack never get bit enough that a fork would emerge or am I missing an obvious one?
- stitched2gethr 7mo agoTry proxymock. It's not open source but it is free to use.
- jzelinskie 7mo agoAn emulator for integration testing against the major cloud providers seems like it should: 1. be table-stakes for a SDK from the cloud providers themselves 2. have the obvious home in a foundation like the CNCF; how else could you be "cloud native" afterall?
- rorychatt 7mo agoha. Cloud Native ≠ Native Cloud Services. I always found it odd that the marketing successfully pivoted the term Cloud Native from meaning 'managed services consumed as APIs over the internet' to a generic umbrella for self-hosted versions of the cloud control planes and container management tooling. That isn't a dig at the particular tools themselves - they just aren't... you know... cloud.
- eddythompson80 7mo agoK8s mostly provides that layer. What’s missing is for cloud providers to implement all their services as k8s resources. Many already are, like all the networking stuff, VMs, storage and loadbalancers. I think it’s missing things like an object or kv store, sql databases, etc. won’t be surprised if they eventually make their way there. But like everything complicated, you’ll end up with people taking dependence’s on various vendor specific behaviors or features. f you were trying to unify cloud providers existing manages services and consume them as APIs over the internet, you would begin by defining what that API is, not adopt an existing vendor API. And that’s what k8s did.
- inglor 7mo agoFirst minio and then localstack, as an open source maintainer I find that abandoning their community is bad faith. I totally get wanting to monetize but removing the free product entirely feels like such a betrayel. Luckily, I've been vibing with Devin since this started having it build a cleanbox emulator on top of real s3 tuned for my specific use case. It's a lot less general but it's much faster and easy to add the sort of assertions I need in it. It's no localstack but for my limited use case it works.
- gzread 7mo agoIt does feel like a betrayal. We live in a world where money is the main thing that matters and it's increasingly hard to come by and you need increasingly more of it (these are all designed policies, not emergent behavior). It makes sense that people don't want to do things for free unless they already have enough money. Engineers who remained apolitical are now surprised the politics is bad.
- Adiqq 7mo agoPersonally I think we should at least discuss changing this system into something that is more sustainable. Money is main thing, because it was decided that private property is more important than people. People like Joseph Stiglitz show that there's no such a thing as an invisible hand, even though he still believes in free market.
- varispeed 7mo ago> I totally get wanting to monetize Yup, unfortunately people need to eat.
- vasco 7mo agoYeah these moves will gain them a year or so but all these companies built on a "takes time to implement library" are all dead in the water. Localstack has nothing fancy, it just takes time to build. And that moat is gone, it's maybe 4 weekends of token quotas I wouldn't use anyway.
- obsidianbases1 7mo agoThere's going to be a lot of complaints about open-source restricting access. It's going to keep happening because it just doesn't make sense for a lot of previous business models that supported and open-source project, something that was seen recently with tailwind. In one of my projects, one that remains source-available, I had encountered an "open-source justice warrior" that made it their mission to smear the project because of the switch, grasping at straws to do everything they could to paint my intentions as malicious. It's really too bad, and will only hurt the availability of free alternatives if one cannot provide the source under a "just don't commercially compete with the paid version of the product" license without getting branded as a scamming cash grabber
- drnick1 7mo agoSource available with various arbitrary restriction is non-free software. What the "open source warriors" take exception to is presenting a project as "open source" or "free" when in reality it is not.
- skeledrew 7mo agoA thing cannot be considered free/open source if there are restrictions on what users can do with it. If a maintainer wishes to put a "don't compete commercially" license then it should be clearly labelled as source available, not open source. To do otherwise is to deceive the open source community, which has a particular and well defined understanding of what "open source" entails.
- luipugs 7mo agoAre you arguing that copyleft is not open source?
- mgulick 7mo agoFrom https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd: > 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor > > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research. A non-commercial clause is a discrimination against a field of endeavor and thus non-open-source. The license cannot restrict how the user is able to *use* the software and still be open source. There can however be requirements to distribute the source code when distributing the software, ala GPL.
- dbacar 7mo agoI bet they will be deleting code from the archived code just like that minio people.
- ryguz 7mo ago[dead]
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoI have been working with AWS for almost a decade on professionally and never saw a reason not just to run test and develop in a real isolated AWS account with security policies (guardrails) and give out accounts with budget alerts.
- drzaiusx11 7mo agoWe all have personal AWS environments and use them as need arises at my org. Doesn't stop the fact cloudformation deployments take inordinate amounts of time for seemingly no reason. Basic shit like pushing a new ECS task takes 10+ minutes alone. Need to push an IAM policy change by itself? 5 minutes. Maybe it's the CDK, but we've only been on that a couple years, prior we used a ansible and cloudformation templates directly but it wasn't any better. This compounds with each dev and each change across multiple stacks. Not only that cloudformation easily gets "stuck" in unrecoverable states when rollback fails and you have to manually clean up to clean up drift which can easily eat your entire day. I'll note that our stacks have good separation by concerns, doesn't matter. A full deployment of a single ECS service easily takes 30 minutes. This is so wasteful it's absurd. I'd love to NOT have to use a shim like LocalStack but the alternative is what?
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoI have been using a modified version of this for 8 years. I didn’t write it https://github.com/1Strategy/fargate-cloudformation-example/blob/master/fargate.yaml https://github.com/1Strategy/fargate-cloudformation-example/... It’s never taken 30 minutes to pass in a new parameter value for the Docker container. Also as far as rollbacks just use —disable-rollbacks. The only time I’ve had CFT get stuck is using custom resources when I didn’t have proper error handling and I didn’t send the failure signal back to CFT. This is with raw CFT using SAM.
- drzaiusx11 7mo agoFailed deployments without rollbacks still leave you in a unusable state and manual rollbacks of a failed service deployment can take as long to cleanup as the failed rollback you just disabled especially when dealing with persistent resources. That linked fargate stack is fairly bare bones in comparison to what we run in ECS and we maintain our own AMIs that are built nightly for security updates and ECR resources from docker build pipelines which need to go together in a real AWS environment to have any hope of actually working. A failure in one has cascading effects on others and cleanup is a pain. Passing a new parameter isn't a real exercise and we need a new docker build with every code change. Glad you have a minimalist setup and can get by with what? 10m deployments end to end? Sadly that's not the world I live in...
- mmarian 7mo agoWrote a blog post advising people not to run this sort of stuff last year: https://developerwithacat.com/blog/032025/test-containers-bad-idea/ https://developerwithacat.com/blog/032025/test-containers-ba... It's just too much hassle to replicate cloud environments locally, just use unit tests and dev environments.
- uwais12 7mo ago[flagged]
- gmerc 7mo agoProbably to do with the emergence of a vibe coded app that probably used their tests and code https://github.com/hectorvent/floci https://github.com/hectorvent/floci
- Art9681 7mo agoThat solution can be recreated by a skilled AI boosted senior platform engineer in a few days and parity achieved in a few weeks. Nothing of value was lost.
- ivolimmen 7mo agoI worked for a company that also used AWS. It was a cloud-first company so we needed to use AWS stuff even if there was a more portable variant available. We needed to run this Localstack to get stuff done. I really did not like using localstack.
- jamafu 7mo agoI never understood why AWS doesn't provide something like LocalStack out of the box. Any team building serious software on AWS needs to mock AWS services in their CI/CD pipelines. What exactly are they expecting developers to do? They would probably argue something like "spin up real infrastructure so you are as close to production as possible" because this way they could make even more money while also avoiding the implementation / maintenance cost of the mocks.
- afandian 7mo agoMy general principle has been “don’t build what you can’t test locally”. It seems so obvious but PaaS does challenge it. It also has the benefit of steering clear of exotic proprietary features that are hard to migrate between providers. Local stack formed a big part of making that principle realistic. (EDIT - but I can see how that's counter to AWS' interests! It's desirable that they provide it, but not surprising that they don't.)
- devkarev 7mo ago[dead]
- theshrike79 7mo agoFor a subset of people the AWS version of localstack would be enough to run production loads. Which is bad for business =)
- tekkk 7mo agoThat doesn't make sense. You use AWS services because they are in the cloud, not because you want to do self-hosting. Similar to Cloudflare wrangler, localstack should be just a well-built local mocking service.
- theshrike79 7mo agoThere's still a cost. If you're a cost-conscious startup, you could use AWS Local Thingie to run it on a 5€/month VPS while you validate your idea. Then if you get actual customers you could move it to proper AWS - or you might find out that Fake-AWS is actually enough for you and a 20€ VPS is enough for your uses and pay 0€ to Amazon, while still filing bug tickets to AWS Local Thingie Github for bugs and feature requests =)
- junon 7mo agoPerhaps we should stop running things on clouds to begin with. Localstack's main point was that AWS cannot be run locally. Nobody seems to have a problem with that here, which is the bigger problem.
- EXHades 7mo ago[dead]