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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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) :)
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
Running arbitrary code directly in your terminal is very dangerous
6 replies →
I'm worried that this behaviour has to be defended.
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.
> 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:
faisca.dev is also vibed - perhaps it's a real human using AI to build an online fascade
3 replies →
Interesting thing, looking forward to testing it with my Smithy-generated Python AWS SDK https://github.com/kap-sh/capo
There are so many of these, but none of them simulate the surprise-billing experience.
File a feature request! ;)
"46 at true 100% conformance". This is factually incorrect. Inspected their DynamoDB service and it comes nowhere close to implementing the full api.
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.
Wow! This is not production-ready at all. DynamoDB would be my main use case. I'll stick with DynamoDB local.
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.
I use tf with floci and floci-gcp, weekly…
Oh nice, not aware of this. We're opentofu on GCP, so could be a good addition to ci
I kinda like most of these emulators but why is there none targeting GCP/Azure
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.
Right. Floci got posted yesterday here on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49854416
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) :)
Hard to replicate all the bugs in azure.
Agreed. Azure would be nice. Something that can work with Terraform too.
Check out floci-az. I haven’t touched it but I know it’s there.
But how does it compare to floci, which already picked up with localstack left off?
Floci happened to be discussed yesterday, with 47 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49854416
you mean floci? https://floci.io/floci/
Yeah. Stupid really didn’t want to type that. :)
Local stubs like this are a lifesaver for one-person webhook testing without burning cloud credits every morning.
There is also localemu, which I understand to be another localstack fork: https://localemu.cloud/
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?
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.
> 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.
1 reply →
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.