Fakecloud: Local AWS cloud emulator for integration tests (fakecloud.dev)
90 points by theanonymousone a day ago
otterley 7 hours ago
There’s also MiniStack, which forked from LocalStack after they started breaking developer workflows: https://ministack.org/
Both fakecloud and its website look sloppily vibe-coded, and its “authors” are anonymous. It’s going to take a while for it to earn trust. I’d treat it with suspicion. (Curl-to-shell pipe to install? Ugh.)
straygarr 7 hours ago
Agreed with everything up to:
"curl-to-shell pipe to install" - what's the problem here? that's pretty common on linux systems and something the AWS CLI uses.
Or is the problem the fact that this dev is untrusted and is executing a possibly malicious script on your machine?
jasongi 6 hours ago
For a mock server? Surely a versioned, standalone executable, library/package or docker image makes more sense. Integration tests generally need to be portable and running on CI, you don't wanna be shell-piping whatever exists in the moment.
ssl-3 4 hours ago
The problem, for me, is that self-running installers can create a mess that's hard to keep track of.
I've run Linux without meaningful package management, as that was kind of the style of the time 30 years ago with Slackware. It can quickly become untenable.
There's no real difference between an uninspected script that gets piped straight from the URL into the shell, or a similarly-uninspected make&&sudo make install routine from a tarball. They can both execute code that does bad things (whether unintentionally or deliberately), and they can both leave a mess that is hard to cleaned up.
I've found that it is better to just avoid going down that road to begin with. Whether distro-specific packages, Docker containers, flatpaks, or whatever: All of these make housekeeping easier.
MisterMunchkin 6 hours ago
Running arbitrary code directly in your terminal is very dangerous
luma 5 hours ago
sdcfgy 6 hours ago
I'm worried that this behaviour has to be defended.
x3n0ph3n3 5 hours ago
curl-to-shell is a terrible installation mechanism because it's not easily reversible and I can't tell if any of the assets are signed, or integrity checked, or not.
tingletech 6 hours ago
> and its “authors” are anonymous.
The blog posts are all attributed to "Lucas Vieira" and the dev group https://faisca.dev that is attributed as the author has 2 other projects. Lucas comes up in LinkedIn and looks like an actual person working in San Francisco.
Re: curl; this seems to work:
cargo install fakecloudlosteric 5 hours ago
faisca.dev is also vibed - perhaps it's a real human using AI to build an online fascade
SomeUserName432 3 hours ago
_zoltan_ 3 hours ago
shermantanktop 6 hours ago
There are so many of these, but none of them simulate the surprise-billing experience.
igetspam 6 hours ago
File a feature request! ;)
arpinum 5 hours ago
"46 at true 100% conformance". This is factually incorrect. Inspected their DynamoDB service and it comes nowhere close to implementing the full api.
arpinum 5 hours ago
Here are some bugs: - `ADD m.a.c :inc` update expression wrote a literal top-level m.a.c attribute but didn't change the nested number. - TransactGetItems returned fields not requested. - update expression can update the same key multiple times.
In total my conformance suite found 583 failures out of 1279 tests.
equinumerous 2 hours ago
Wow! This is not production-ready at all. DynamoDB would be my main use case. I'll stick with DynamoDB local.
arpinum 42 minutes ago
karpetrosyan 2 hours ago
Interesting thing, looking forward to testing it with my Smithy-generated Python AWS SDK https://github.com/kap-sh/capo
matt3210 an hour ago
Why not just offer an AWS compatible cloud service at this point ... can you copyright an API?
bilekas 8 hours ago
There are always nice, but there are a lot of scaffolding work involved with larger systems. It would be nice to be able to provide for example the terraform of the infrastructure and let these tool create their own. Might be a nice feature to add because I haven't seen it done yet.
igetspam 8 hours ago
I use tf with floci and floci-gcp, weekly…
_joel 8 hours ago
Oh nice, not aware of this. We're opentofu on GCP, so could be a good addition to ci
gyre007 8 hours ago
I kinda like most of these emulators but why is there none targeting GCP/Azure
figmert 8 hours ago
AWS is still way ahead in cloud usage, that's probably why AWS is the primary target. Anyway, floci has GCP and Azure versions, how mature they are, I'm unsure. But it does exist.
oso2k 6 hours ago
Right. Floci got posted yesterday here on HN.
tombuildsstuff 7 hours ago
I'm launching something in that space this week - if you're interested in trying one of those out, feel free drop me a message via my website (in bio) :)
undefined 7 hours ago
Hikikomori 6 hours ago
Hard to replicate all the bugs in azure.
nullbio 7 hours ago
Agreed. Azure would be nice. Something that can work with Terraform too.
igetspam 6 hours ago
Check out floci-az. I haven’t touched it but I know it’s there.
igetspam 8 hours ago
But how does it compare to floci, which already picked up with localstack left off?
WalterGR 7 hours ago
Floci happened to be discussed yesterday, with 47 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49854416
duesabati 8 hours ago
you mean floci? https://floci.io/floci/
igetspam 8 hours ago
Yeah. Stupid really didn’t want to type that. :)
michaelastreiko 4 hours ago
Local stubs like this are a lifesaver for one-person webhook testing without burning cloud credits every morning.
jeduardo 6 hours ago
There is also localemu, which I understand to be another localstack fork: https://localemu.cloud/
Lucasoato 7 hours ago
I always welcome warmly projects like these, the only problem is that unless there’s a strong community behind, founders tend to build companies around them, raise capital, then put useful functionalities behind paywalls (see localstack).
When I see that, it always reminds me of Steve Jobs’s quote: ”It’s not a product, it’s a feature”.
Aren’t cloud companies like AWS, Azure, GCP the first to be interested in providing their users a meaningful way to do test integrations of their products? Shouldn’t they provide them in the first place?
stackskipton 5 hours ago
It depends on the company. Azure provides local emulators for some of their products like CosmosDB and Azure Storage.
Depending on what your size and other things, sometimes it's just easier to have dev instances you test against. Like S3 emulator, you could download one of many and test it but unless your test suite is extensive, the costs against S3 test bucket would probably cost you .03 cents for assurances that everything will work against AWS. If that's breaking the bank at the company, you probably have bigger problems.
hvb2 4 hours ago
> Like S3 emulator, you could download one of many and test it but unless your test suite is extensive, the costs against S3 test bucket would probably cost you .03 cents
Not sure if your serious.
You picked the simplest service that isn't expensive at all to run. Have you tried with an RDS cluster for example, how does that work?
Does your integration test create a new cluster to use? That's slow to set up.
Does it use an existing one? Now you might have failures due to noisy neighbors and your cost will not be small.
And that's just RDS, as soon as it's not serverless, costs aren't trivial anymore.
stackskipton 4 hours ago
igetspam 6 hours ago
You’d think that but it doesn’t seem to be the case. I do a lot of offline development and the only way it used to be possible was localstack but that’s AWS only. The open source community is the only interested party, it seems. Thankfully, there’s a lot of contribution happening in this space. Because I have need, I make a lot of my own contributions. I’m doing full stack cloud development against GCP without ever leaving my device.