Cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure should offer local emulators for development. This would encourage developers to utilize their services more.

I currently work with several AWS serverless stacks that are challenging or even impossible to integration test locally. While Localstack provide a decent solution, it seems like a service that AWS should offer to enhance the developer experience. They’d also be in the best position to keep it current.

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hrmtst93837 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

An official local emulator sounds nice until AWS has to explain why S3, IAM, or Kinesis behave a little differntly on your laptop, because the minute it's blessed people will treat every mismatch as an AWS bug, not a dev-time compromise.

AWS don't want that support nightmare.

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hendry 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I noticed an AWS engineer publish a local AWS suite https://github.com/local-web-services/local-web-services which seems comparable.

Great to see Localstack offset a bit thanks to ... AI driven shift left infrastructure tooling? This is a great trend.

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LTL_FTC 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Microsoft used to with their Azure Service Dev Kit. the ASDK was a single-node "sandbox" meant to emulate the entire Azure cloud locally. They may have something similar now but paired back

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dgxyz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I disagree with this entirely.

You should build your software around abstractions and interfaces which are portable enough to work locally and in AWS or any other cloud and not just AWS specific APIs.

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redserk 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I agree that this is what everyone should strive to do but this quickly hits a limit.

For example, IAM/S3/SQS policy evaluations can have profound impact on an application running but an abstraction wouldn’t help much here (assuming the developer is putting any thought into securing things). There just isn’t an alternative to these. If you’re rolling out an application using AWS-proprietary services, you have to get into vendor-specific functionality.

	▲	dgxyz 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		My point is you should not build on top of their native services if it incurs this problem.

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adobrawy 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

CloudFlare for their serverless offering did it, and it works decent.

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hrmtst93837 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

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hmartin 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They should... put work into sacrificing revenue?

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bensyverson 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you have a local “digital twin” of the service, it makes it much easier to develop against using AI. This would likely drive adoption.

	▲	fabianlindfors 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Totally agree that AI coding makes this even more important. We are working on a coding agent-first cloud and a large part of that is ensuring everything runs locally so folks can let their coding agents define the infra and test it all
	▲	Onavo 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's even easier for their revenue if you have to provision dev AWS environments for everyone.

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boomlinde 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Without the infrastructure behind it to make it make sense, cloud platforms just seem like convoluted ways of storing data and launching applications/VMs to me.

The only functional use of a tool like this to me would be to learn how to use AWS so that I can work for people who want me to use AWS. Would that not be to Amazon's benefit?

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borplk 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not clear that it would be a net-negative on the revenue.

It could encourage more development and adoption and lead to being a net-positive for the revenue.

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hmartin 11 hours ago | parent [-]

It's a fair point but iff you neglect that the overwhelming revenue drivers for these services are large corps who are already locked-in. Devx doesn't matter at all once you're there.

The myopathy among us "online people" is assuming number of voices here and elsewhere correlate to revenue.

It does not.

	▲	shrikant 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Just fyi, myopathy is a general term for diseases that affect some types of muscles, while myopia is short-sightedness -- assuming the latter is what you were going for!
	▲	boomlinde 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If it's irrelevant whether or not individual developers are on board, why are Amazon offering a free plan?