Seamless AWS Development and Testing Locally

Intro to LocalStack and sample app that demos the drop-in AWS replacement.

Transcript

1. Seamless AWS Cloud Development and Testing Locally
2. anca.ghenade@localstack.cloud @tinyg210 tinyg210 Anca Ghenade Developer Advocate @ LocalStack
3. How does one go around developing applications using AWS services? A short story… with cats.
4. 1. So you’re tasked with developing a new web application on AWS Cloud
5. 2. Developing on a local machine, you soon find out that there are lots of dependencies with resources in the cloud
6. 3. You realize that the dev & test loop is extremely slow and tedious. Every local change needs to be packaged and uploaded to the cloud for testing.
7. 4. You have a red build on your feature branch, but can’t efficiently test and debug the code in the CI/CD pipeline.
8. 5. The whole team is using Git flow for development - one CI build per feature branch. There is an explosion of different environments required for development (branches x developers).
9. 6. Your manager approaches the team and complains that AWS dev/test resources are not being cleaned up properly causing cost spikes.
10. Additional pain points: You’re working in environments that have concerns about: • Security • Regulatory compliance • Data Sovereignty • Risk Management * We’re talking about banking and healthcare especially here.
11. So the developer experience is… complex. 󰤆
12. What is LocalStack? A fully functional local cloud stack that was born out of these exact concerns.
13. • Enables a highly efficient dev & test loop for cloud apps • Ships as a Docker image, easy to install and start up • Support for a growing number of services: ◦ compute (Lambda, ECS, EKS) ◦ various databases (DynamoDB, RDS) ◦ messaging (SQS, Kinesis, MSK) ◦ some sophisticated/exotic APIs (Athena, Glue) • CI integrations & advanced collaboration features ◦ redefining the way cloud apps are developed across the lifecycle. • Support for practices like chaos engineering, ephemeral environments for PRs.
14. “Your application won’t even know the difference.”
15. Source: https://github.com/tinyg210/san-francisco-ship
17. Business Logic: • Shipment entities • The shipment has weight defined (for ship/plane calculations) • We need to add the size as a picture • For size we’re using the IIS (Internet International System) “Banana for scale”
18. Technical recap • Bean configuration - using Java @Configuration classes • Java AWS SDK - helps interaction with resources • Spring Profiles - environment specific configuration • IaC via Terraform - consistency across environments
19. Scenario 1 Scenario 2
21. You have reasons: • Most applications are complex in used resources • Creating resources is time consuming • Development cycles can be slow - costs developer time • Resources are tedious to clean up • If not disposed of properly, resources can be costly • Interaction between services can be slow on AWS
23. IaC Tools Developer Tools Language SDKs App Frame- works CI/CD Systems TESTCONTAINERS Copilot
24. Some benchmarking: AWS LocalStack
25. What about testing your AWS-powered applications?
26. YES
28. How much of your system you can test Cloud emulation Full cloud emulation with service integration 3 Staging environments Highest fidelity because it actually runs in the cloud 4 Mocking Mock out cloud APIs 1 Service emulation Replace individual services with local versions 2 Testability of Cloud App Deployments
30. Testcontainers
31. Test successful POST Test successful GET Test fails validation on incorrect values Test 404 on wrong param
33. AWS Parity • AWS Server Framework ◦ weekly runs to check parity ◦ makes heavy use of botocore • Snapshot testing • Metrics collection to track test coverage
34. Thank You!