Although I wouldn't recommend using LocalStack's SQS implementation for production workloads, calling it a dumb mock is a bit outdated. It emulates pretty much every SQS behvaior including long polling, delayed messages, visibility timeouts, DLQ redrive, batch send/receive, ...

You can buy LocalStack on the AWS market place if you want to hide it in your infra bill ;-)

thanks for saying that! people are pretty skeptical about localstack when they hear about it for the first time, and don't understand how we could ever emulate something remotely resembling AWS. tbh sometimes i'm baffled myself, it's pretty crazy what it can already do (i work there).

GCP emulators cover only a very small portion of their services though. AWS also has emulators for some services they provide free of charge. LocalStack adds more than just emulation though, it has a bunch of developer tools that enables local cloud dev much more broadly.

You can definitely emulate parts of this. For example LocalStack can spawn ECS tasks using Docker, or EC2 VMs using something like VirtualBox. Load balancers are also emulated, so you can test load balancing configurations with IP address or Lambda targets. LocalStack is currently not emulating all of the VPC network configuration, so although you can make the API calls to create VPCs subnet groups and so on, LocalStack currently wouldn't enforce these on a network level.

Thanks for the detailed reply. Would I be able to take most, if not all, of my existing Terraform code and use it to stand up my topology in LocalStack? If so, that would be quite useful.

yes, if you pay for localstack Pro, and "maybe" if you don't. they have a list of services they emulate on their site.

Here is the list: https://docs.localstack.cloud/aws/feature-coverage/

Thanks very much!

i think cloud providers have little incentive to help you develop and test everything locally, since they benefit more from onboarding you quickly into using their infrastructure, which they can much better monetize on. it seems to me that a completely local cloud stack would be threatening to cloud providers also in that you can then start running non-critical applications on-prem at no cost.

i don't think that's a real threat -- i don't think development environments are likely a huge income source for them, either.

i think they'd be better served by letting me develop more quickly, so I can help my company grow, and presumably need (and have the budget for!) more resources in our production environment.

if i'm mistaken, i think it's reasonable to have some sort of built in time limit to how long the appliance will run for, or some other way of preventing it being used for non-development purposes.

Is it the startup time or the overall performance during runtime?