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I’ve been exploring LocalStack for AWS emulation and found it to be a fantastic tool for local development and testing.

I’m curious to know if the LocalStack project receives any support or collaboration from AWS developers. Additionally, I’m interested in understanding why AWS has not introduced its own official emulator similar to, for example, Microsoft’s Azurite for Azure Storage. Maybe, AWS encourage the use of third-party tools like LocalStack, which already provide emulator capabilities or they do not have enough resources to maintain an emulator besides focusing and maintaining th real service.

Thanks for your time,
Anna

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Hi Anna — Thanks for reaching out!

Those are pretty interesting questions — We are an AWS Partner and LocalStack is also part of the AWS Marketplace. We have been in touch with AWS for quite sometime, and there is definitely a lot of positive feedback coming from AWS about the tooling and the product.

AWS does in fact provide and maintain service emulators for a few services, such as DynamoDB Local and Step Functions Local. We use these alongside LocalStack as well.

I hope this helps! Thank You.

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Thanks for getting back, Harsh!

I have one follow-up question. If AWS itself is providing its own emulator e.g., DynamoDB Local, how different is it from LocalStack’s DynamoDB emulator? Are you incorporating their version in LocalStack or do you provide one with better fidelity?

Thanks,
Anna

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Hi Anna, apologies for the late response.

LocalStack uses DynamoDB Local under the hood but there are add-on features, such as:

  • Global Tables: DynamoDB Local doesn’t support Global Tables, which are a collection of one or more replica tables within a single AWS account. LocalStack supports Global Tables, allowing you to create replica tables on your local machine.
  • Multi-Accounts and Multi-Region Support: DynamoDB Local doesn’t support namespacing based AWS account IDs or regions. LocalStack, however, supports scenarios involving multiple accounts and regions, and even cross-account and cross-region setups.
  • Persistence and Cloud Pods: With LocalStack, you can persist your DynamoDB tables and items across restarts and use Cloud Pods to take snapshots of your LocalStack instance for collaborative debugging. These features are not available with DynamoDB Local.
  • Integrations with other services: DynamoDB Local is limited to DynamoDB only and doesn’t support cross-service integration. LocalStack allows you to use DynamoDB with other AWS features such as Kinesis Data Streams and DynamoDB Streams for testing various use cases.