Ugh, 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.

▲

drzaiusx11 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Unclear 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.

▲

hexedpackets 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Got 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.