[whummer]

Great point. Fully agree that providing a first-class local development experience is critical to the overall story of application development frameworks.

I guess the main difference is that frameworks like Serverless provide a great experience if you fully buy into their way of doing things (i.e., implement your application assets in the Serverless YAML DSL, etc), whereas LocalStack is a generic platform that works on the API emulation level, hence easily integrates with most tooling out of the box.

Making the switch from Serverless to, say, AWS CDK, or AWS SAM, or Architect framwork may not be as seamless - however, for each of these frameworks you can always run the local emulation natively on LocalStack. This can help reduce the overall vendor lock-in effect that a lot of application development frameworks come with.

In fact, LocalStack also provides an integration with Serverless [0] - among many other tools [1].

[0] https://github.com/localstack/serverless-localstack

[1] https://docs.localstack.cloud/integrations

[jayair]

I'm biased but for local development, I prefer to emulate the least amount of AWS services. You don't have to deal with any gotchas while going to prod.

Some background, with SST we connect your local environment to the services deployed to AWS and just run the Lambda functions locally: https://docs.sst.dev/live-lambda-development

[chops415]

SST has been a breath of fresh air. Very excellent devex for companies using serverless.