I never understood why AWS doesn't provide something like LocalStack out of the box. Any team building serious software on AWS needs to mock AWS services in their CI/CD pipelines. What exactly are they expecting developers to do? They would probably argue something like "spin up real infrastructure so you are as close to production as possible" because this way they could make even more money while also avoiding the implementation / maintenance cost of the mocks.

My general principle has been “don’t build what you can’t test locally”. It seems so obvious but PaaS does challenge it.

It also has the benefit of steering clear of exotic proprietary features that are hard to migrate between providers.

Local stack formed a big part of making that principle realistic.

(EDIT - but I can see how that's counter to AWS' interests! It's desirable that they provide it, but not surprising that they don't.)

For a subset of people the AWS version of localstack would be enough to run production loads. Which is bad for business =)

That doesn't make sense. You use AWS services because they are in the cloud, not because you want to do self-hosting. Similar to Cloudflare wrangler, localstack should be just a well-built local mocking service.

There's still a cost.

If you're a cost-conscious startup, you could use AWS Local Thingie to run it on a 5€/month VPS while you validate your idea.

Then if you get actual customers you could move it to proper AWS - or you might find out that Fake-AWS is actually enough for you and a 20€ VPS is enough for your uses and pay 0€ to Amazon, while still filing bug tickets to AWS Local Thingie Github for bugs and feature requests =)

The most important productivity tool that I use is Alfred[0] for MacOS. Nothing ever came close to increase my productivity as Alfred did. The two features that are essential for me are the clip board manager and the so called "workflows" which is basically a script launcher. The user experience is an absolute joy, it is deeply customizable and you can do pretty much anything you want. Just to name a few:

* encode / decode strings from any encoding to any encoding

* access Jira tickets by only entering ticket numbers

* instant access to all my dot files

* HTTP status codes explanations simply by entering the status code

* list and kill any process

* Docker management

* port killer: enter port and kill the service that uses it

* timestamp converter - from any format to any format

* UUID generator

* super fast access to 100s of weblinks (repos, miros, wikis, documentations, etc.)

It has a free base version but if you want to use the good stuff you have to buy a license for £59. I cannot recommend it strong enough, I even gifted licenses to colleagues, friends and family. [0] https://www.alfredapp.com/

Semi related: check out libraryofbabel [1] or the Vscauce video [2]

[1] https://libraryofbabel.info

[2] https://youtu.be/GDrBIKOR01c?t=1032

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se2RN1t-XVI

We use Keycloak at our place and are really happy with it.

Website: https://www.keycloak.org/

GitHub: https://github.com/keycloak/keycloak

Jup, it's quite nice!