Fakecloud: Local AWS cloud emulator for integration tests (fakecloud.dev)

91 pointsby theanonymousonea day ago48 comments

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?

MisterMunchkin 7 hours ago

Running arbitrary code directly in your terminal is very dangerous

luma 6 hours ago

Any code I didn't write is arbitrary code. At some point I'm left to trust someone or run no software at all.

mulmen 5 hours ago

It’s a shell script. You can download and read it before you run it. Piping it directly to the shell is reckless.

I’m not sure how your machine is configured but mine has permission boundaries and security policies that make sure programs are behaving properly. I don’t run everything with my personal user context.

mynameisvlad 4 hours ago

So then... Just do that and it's no longer reckless.

If someone wants to be reckless they can be. If someone doesn't, they also have that ability.

bornfreddy 4 hours ago

Actually... Server can detect if you are piping or not and serve a modified version for inspection.

But really, there is no reason not to use prebuilt packages for distribution. Curlpiping needs to die.

otterley 4 hours ago

At first I thought “this sounds like bullshit” but then found https://web.archive.org/web/20230408195648/https://www.idont...

sdcfgy 6 hours ago

I'm worried that this behaviour has to be defended.

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.

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.

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.

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 fakecloud

losteric 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

I don't think it's being questioned that at some point there is human behind this. Though it could always be that spider.

_zoltan_ 3 hours ago

why does it matter that it's a vibe coded website?

otterley an hour ago

Because taste, creativity, and differentiation matter to a human audience. Perhaps not you personally, but to most people. Ask any experienced marketer.

iLoveOncall 7 minutes ago

> Both fakecloud and its website look sloppily vibe-coded

As if the MiniStack website wasn't also obviously vibe-coded lol.

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 an hour ago

Funny fact, DynamoDB local fails about 100 of my conformance tests. Mainly around error message formatting and text. Just be careful about parsing those.

nnucera 4 minutes ago

https://paritysuite.org/ You can check this, awesome work they have to check ddb vs real (local ddb also has a lot of diff with real ddb)

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49854416

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) :)

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.

Hikikomori 6 hours ago

Hard to replicate all the bugs in azure.

igetspam 9 hours ago

But how does it compare to floci, which already picked up with localstack left off?

duesabati 8 hours ago

you mean floci? https://floci.io/floci/

igetspam 8 hours ago

Yeah. Stupid really didn’t want to type that. :)

WalterGR 7 hours ago

Floci happened to be discussed yesterday, with 47 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49854416

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?

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.

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

I assume for RDS for integration testing, you could just use publicly available software. So stand up MySQL container if your RDS is MySQL. This is integration testing, not load testing so shared RDS in lowers would be fine as well. Noisy neighbors shouldn't be a big deal.

Again, while local cloud emulator is great for cost sensitive customers, at some point, you should test Dev against almost exact environment you will be running Prod on. If not, you are asking for eventual outage in Prod when some slightly different AWS thing bites you.