Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

garrettjoecox

"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"

ksajadi

Complete coincidence but today I was looking for an AWS mock for E2E tests. Not the whole AWS footprint but just a few services and looked at LocalStack for the first time. It took Claude to put together a service (with web interface and everything) for those 2 services 15 mins. I’m not claiming my experience is translated universally but perhaps if your core competency is something like LocalStack you need to think about alternative business ideas.

matt_callmann

What are the alternatives? I primarily used it for S3 and SQS emulation.

iaaan

I evangelized localstack at my company a while back, but as we integrated it deeper into our CI test runs we started running into more and more things they don't support, and it feels impossible to get any attention from their support/devs despite being paying customers. Their Cloud Pod and ephemeral instance features in particular feel pretty half-baked and not very useful at the moment. Fun tangent: it's pretty easy to write a crack for the pro version; we actually used that for about a month as a pilot to confirm that it would do what we needed it to.

tecleandor

They still have linked their OpenCollective account, where they have raised $10K and still have a balance of $5K. [0] It's not a lot in the great scheme of things, but, have they been using a platform that's seemingly built for communities and open source to bootstrap their business? Because this is not a 'open core' situation. They just closed the repo and ran away. If they had that idea all along, I feel like it hasn't be very, let's say, ethical. -- 0: https://opencollective.com/localstack#category-ABOUT

jayofdoom

More reason to run your infrastructure using open source software in your own datacenter. OpenStack has been around for closing in on two decades, running clouds and being mostly governance-drama-free. It's not surprising that a proprietary ecosystem built on open source software locked up behind a gate doesn't make a worthwhile ecosystem for building open source tooling against.

the_mitsuhiko

Did localstack never get bit enough that a fork would emerge or am I missing an obvious one?

stitched2gethr

Try proxymock. It's not open source but it is free to use.

jzelinskie

An emulator for integration testing against the major cloud providers seems like it should: 1. be table-stakes for a SDK from the cloud providers themselves 2. have the obvious home in a foundation like the CNCF; how else could you be "cloud native" afterall?

inglor

First minio and then localstack, as an open source maintainer I find that abandoning their community is bad faith. I totally get wanting to monetize but removing the free product entirely feels like such a betrayel. Luckily, I've been vibing with Devin since this started having it build a cleanbox emulator on top of real s3 tuned for my specific use case. It's a lot less general but it's much faster and easy to add the sort of assertions I need in it. It's no localstack but for my limited use case it works.

obsidianbases1

There's going to be a lot of complaints about open-source restricting access. It's going to keep happening because it just doesn't make sense for a lot of previous business models that supported and open-source project, something that was seen recently with tailwind. In one of my projects, one that remains source-available, I had encountered an "open-source justice warrior" that made it their mission to smear the project because of the switch, grasping at straws to do everything they could to paint my intentions as malicious. It's really too bad, and will only hurt the availability of free alternatives if one cannot provide the source under a "just don't commercially compete with the paid version of the product" license without getting branded as a scamming cash grabber

dbacar

I bet they will be deleting code from the archived code just like that minio people.

raw_anon_1111

I have been working with AWS for almost a decade on professionally and never saw a reason not just to run test and develop in a real isolated AWS account with security policies (guardrails) and give out accounts with budget alerts.

mmarian

Wrote a blog post advising people not to run this sort of stuff last year: https://developerwithacat.com/blog/032025/test-containers-ba... It's just too much hassle to replicate cloud environments locally, just use unit tests and dev environments.

uwais12

This is a concerning trend. Taking an established open source project and essentially forcing users into creating accounts to use it feels like a bait and switch. The community built trust around the open source version and now that trust is being leveraged for sign-ups. I get that companies need to make money but there are better ways to do it than archiving the repo people have been depending on.

gmerc

Probably to do with the emergence of a vibe coded app that probably used their tests and code https://github.com/hectorvent/floci

Art9681

That solution can be recreated by a skilled AI boosted senior platform engineer in a few days and parity achieved in a few weeks. Nothing of value was lost.