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MiniStack (replacement for LocalStack)
- giobox 6mo agoUgh, I hadn't heard the news about the LocalStack licensing changes. I had some great results building AWS services for local dev as well as CI/CD and testing in GH actions with LocalStack in previous jobs. I secretly always hoped Amazon would buy out LocalStack and make it the official free local development environment for AWS work, but I guess it probably would reduce revenues spent on AWS based dev and test environments. The compatibility with the AWS CLI was mostly excellent in my experiences.
- hexedpackets 6mo ago> The compatibility with the AWS CLI was mostly excellent in my experiences. Interesting, I've had the opposite experience. Every single AWS service I've ever tried to build tests around with LocalStack has run into compatibility issues. Usually something works in LocalStack but fails when it hits the real endpoint. I guess the CLI itself has mostly worked, its more the LocalStack service not behaving the way the real service is documented/works.
- drzaiusx11 6mo agoGot any concrete examples? I've been happily using LocalStack for roughly a decade now and haven't run into a single compatibility issue, aside from the obvious missing of net new services for the first N months after AWS product launches. Things like AppConfig, etc, but those gaps got filled in time. They clearly prioritized the 95pct/most used features of each service first though. There's a long tail in some AWS services, as one might expect. I've never used any of the more esoteric AWS feature sets of any of their services. Those are the things that tend to end up deprecated. So requiring those long tail featur sets may be the simple answer to having very different experiences.
- drzaiusx11 6mo agoUnclear what LocalStack's end game is tbh. My company has an active enterprise license atm so their recent changes won't affect me in the short term at least. As of writing I'm still a happy user of LocalStack. Disappointed with their overall direction, but I hold no ill will and I'm sure they had their reasons. I wish them luck. Hopefully this change was not just an short term attempt to lock in current enterprise customers by shoring up existing income streams. That'll only work in the VERY short term. It's not difficult to forsee the inevitable customer drain to free competitors or private one-shots easily produced by genai from publicly available AWS SDK code. Maybe they're already feeling that pressure and that's all this change is. I hope not. AFAICT, they have no appreciable moat to retain customers long term. For example, I have absolutely no interest in their "Pods" or even their console UI, so thosr aren't keeping me around forever. For their sakes I hope they're still shopping themselves around and didn't take some VC poison pill with preconditions for killing the community edition. Really It's anyone's guess though.
- kay_o 6mo ago> Copyright (c) 2024 MiniStack Contributors Already lying or totally unreviewed AI slop ?
- mikecarlton 6mo agoAnother alternative, earlier on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420619
- cmertayak 6mo agoI liked the transparency: "Built entirely with AI by Jack Danger | All prompts saved in prompts/"
- switchbak 6mo agoThus far I've tried that (rejected), Floci (not great), and now looking at this. This one is 7 days old. I'm eager to have a localstack replacement, but these are a long way off from being mature enough. I suppose this is just the new state of software? Shiny website, big claims, AI coded, insufficiently tested.
- thegagne 6mo agoOut of curiosity, why did you reject Floci? It lacked some feature I needed, so I just went ahead and added them. My needs were not that complex and it has patterns to test that implementations match AWS. I agree it’s lacking things, but the bones aren’t that bad.
- switchbak 6mo agoI too added some stuff, but keeping up with the pace of it was annoying. Conflict city, slow reviews made it a headache. In particular my issues were: - missing range fetches (probably in place now) - Missing version support in various places - bugs wrt to the handling of versioned objects across api calls My needs are not super mainstream, but I was better off using RustFS in this case. A single lightweight fake would be preferable though.
- staticassertion 6mo agoI really don't see how any clone is going to manage to do what localstack couldn't - maintain compatibility with tons of AWS services while not getting paid for it. If this were viable, why would it not have worked before? The only things I can think of are that perhaps LocalStack was just a mess of a codebase that couldn't maintain velocity or attract contributors, or it just failed to steward new contributors or some such thing.
- switchbak 6mo ago"LocalStack was just a mess of a codebase" - very true. I do think there's potential to semi-automatically create a compatible suite of services, but it'll require some very talented use of LLMs and some novel testing approaches. Not something I want to sign up for. I evaluated Floci, but that has the typical issues you'd expected with freshly minted vibe code.
- sysguest 6mo agoidk maybe AWS should create one? I mean, if we can use "virtual-AWS", it would dramatically lower entry-barrier for devs/companies who are scared of "tales of huge aws bills" and such
- justincormack 6mo agoIt hasnt really been a barrier to entry though has it, cloud adoption is doing just fine.
- switchbak 6mo agoI wouldn’t hold my breath. They do have a dynamo db fake, but they don’t even release the code for it! Perhaps they’re concerned about making it really easy to clone their stuff. But we can still do that ourselves, dynamically interrogating the real thing and comparing it to the fake.
- mastercomputer 6mo agoWhat are the typical problems you mentioned with Floci? I just went into their repo, and the community is very active; I see a lot of contributions. I'm not sure what you mean by typical problems.
- redlewel 6mo ago[dead]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- volume_tech 6mo ago[flagged]
- heyethan 6mo ago[flagged]
- threethirtytwo 6mo agoWhat’s the gcp equivalent
- nnucera 6mo agoHey! GCP has their own set of tools for emulation. IDK why Amazon dont do the same. It would be way easier for everyone
- oefrha 6mo agoAny project with Claude’s signature misaligned ASCII diagram just screams DON’T USE to me. If you can’t even bother to read your damn generated README, how do I know you have QC’ed anything else? At the very least supported features claimed in README / on website could be totally fake, which is extremely common among all the vibed Show HNs. https://github.com/Nahuel990/ministack/blob/a1b1d20a27d2238dd7b776eeb426e93d816e5c09/README.md#architecture https://github.com/Nahuel990/ministack/blob/a1b1d20a27d2238d...
- sebmellen 6mo agoWe live in the golden age of slop. It seems a surprisingly small number of people have the visceral AI disgust response.
- heliumtera 6mo agoMaybe that visceral response being against the rules (assume good faith) and actively being punished explains the small number of people doing it?
- dspillett 6mo agoMy visceral AI disgust response here is just a subset of my more general lazyly-slapped-together-without-sufficient-testing-or-other-review disgust response. If it doesn't look bad in that way, whether hand-made or ghostwritten, then I'll not react to it that way. But if someone can't be bothered to do a simple clean-up pass on that documentation, what mess could they have left in the code too? As far as I'm concerned the social contract (“the rules”) has already been broken by people taking insufficient care, and my reaction to that is a healthy one from the PoV of self-preservation. Acting in good faith works both ways, or it doesn't.
- heliumtera 6mo ago>Acting in good faith works both ways, or it doesn't. Well said, polluting hacker news with low effort slop for self promotion cannot be good faith. The rules are enforced on commenters but good faith is not expected for submissions somehow
- philip1209 6mo agoI'm frustrated with the Localstack license changes and will evaluate ministack. But, for anybody else who needs a quick fix - you can pin to the `community-archive` tag and it should unblock you quickly: https://hub.docker.com/layers/localstack/localstack/community-archive/images/sha256-f72625f6b9546f1be730e9a9a9b1438c2298a4234634b1b823e3d3294e0b8bbe https://hub.docker.com/layers/localstack/localstack/communit...
- ksh09 6mo agoThoughts on https://github.com/hectorvent/floci https://github.com/hectorvent/floci ?
- Oxodao 6mo agotwo weeks old project that already emulates 20+ services from AWS that's suspicious (tbf ministack is even worse in that matter)
- nnucera 6mo agoFeel free to raise an issue at https://github.com/nahuel990/ministack https://github.com/nahuel990/ministack if any of our emulated services don't work...
- weiyong1024 6mo ago[flagged]
- robshippr 6mo agoThe real issue with LocalStack was always drift. Tests pass locally, then something breaks in staging because the S3 response format is slightly different or DynamoDB throttling doesn't match. After getting burned enough times we just switched to short-lived real AWS environments for integration tests. More expensive, but way fewer surprises in prod.
- chii 6mo agoi would imagine localstack is a sniff-test - aka, if it doesn't pass localstack, you don't run the more expensive real AWS integration test. In other words, like food, you don't eat the cost unless it passes the sniff test.
- tazsat0512 6mo ago[dead]
- jamiemallers 6mo ago[dead]
- MeetRickAI 6mo ago[dead]
- arpinum 6mo agoI have detailed knowledge of dynamodb. This code does not properly mimic the service exceptions, input validations, eventual consistency, or edge cases. I would not feel comfortable developing against ministack or running tests against it. A lot of these services also have free tiers, so the use cases are quite minimal.
- justincormack 6mo agoMostly I think its not about cost, it is about iteration speed and ability to run in CI environments fast.
- whalesalad 6mo agoIf your CI DB is not 100% in parity with the real db -- you are setting yourself up for disaster. It is a false sense of security. Same reason I wince when people say things like "we just use SQLite in tests, but our real db is mysql/psql/etc" The test results have no merit if they are testing against a glorified mock.
- justincormack 6mo agoYou can have fast tests and slow. Having fast tests to make progress working on features is important.
- victorbjorklund 6mo agoYou could have the fast tests that catch 99,9999% of the issues on feature branches and just run the real slow test before putting in prod.
- nnucera 6mo agoHello! The target use case is integration testing, verifying that your application calls the right operations with the right data, not production fidelity. For that, MiniStack works well and is free. For anything requiring exact DynamoDB behavior (capacity throttling, consistency window, stream processing), you're right that it's not a substitute. Contributions to improve error fidelity are very welcome (we have pending ProvisionedThroughputExceededException, TransactionConflictException, ItemCollectionSizeLimitExceededException)
- SophieVeldman 6mo ago[flagged]
- opengrass 6mo agoFR: real cost simulator
- shantnutiwari 6mo agoAs other commenters have noted, this looks like AI slop. Why is it on the front page? If you go on Reddit, there are at least a dozen AI "vibe coded" shitty local stack alternatives being posted daily. Whats special about this??
- nnucera 6mo agoA bunch of these are popping up because LocalStack changed their free tier and people needed something else. This isn’t trying to replace all of LocalStack. Just the basic stuff people were using before, and keep it fast for local dev.. If you care about exact behavior or edge cases you still need real AWS. This is more for quick integration tests so you’re not hitting AWS all the time. What’s different? IDK, you could try the "dozen AI vibe coded shitty local stack alternatives" and post it on your blog
- steffs 6mo ago[flagged]
- slopinthebag 6mo agoAI comments are against the rules
- techwithprateek 6mo agoI think it's still very early for this to be adapted in the SDLC, but looks very promising. I am frustrated with Localstack at this point, and this may just do the job.
- tomerbd 6mo ago[dead]
- lucas_vieira 6mo ago[dead]
- GRACE44 6mo ago[dead]