Cloud Pods

Cloud Pods provides a new way of collaborating in cloud application development workflows.

Cloud Pods are a mechanism that allows you to take a snapshot of the state in your current LocalStack instance, persist it to a storage backend, and easily share it with your team members.

While the Persistence feature ensures that the service state survives container restarts, Cloud Pods go beyond and allow more fine-grained control over your state. Instead of simply restoring a state when restarting LocalStack, Cloud Pods allow you to take snapshots of your local instance (with the commit command) and inject such snapshots into a running instance (with the inject command) without requiring a restart.

In addition, we provide a remote storage backend that can be used to store the state of your running application and share it with your team members.

You can interact with Cloud Pods via the Web UI, and to load and store the persistent state of pods, you can use the localstack command-line interface (CLI).

Below is a simple example of how you can push and pull Cloud Pods to/from the remote platform using the localstack CLI:

# User 1 pushes state of Cloud Pod to persistent server
$ awslocal kinesis list-streams
{"StreamNames": ["mystream123"]}
$ localstack pod push --name mypod1
...
# User 2 pulls state from the server to local instance
$ localstack pod pull --name mypod1
$ awslocal kinesis list-streams
{"StreamNames": ["mystream123"]}

Current Limitations

Currently, Cloud Pods CLI commands require to set a LOCALSTACK_API_KEY. Additionally, they require to install localstack runtime dependencies. You can install them with pip install localstack"[runtime]".

After pulling the pod, LocalStack will automatically inject its state into your instance at runtime, without requiring a restart. By default, the injecting state will replace the one in current the application state. The application and the injecting state can be merged with the --merge flag.

Please be aware that the merge feature is still experimental and might lead sometimes to unwanted results. Please make sure to create a backup of any data before merging a cloud pod, if required.

Cloud Pods CLI

LocalStack provides a command line tool to manage the state of your instance via Cloud Pods.

Last modified July 14, 2022: fix minor typo in Cloud Pods documentation (#205) (0a18c9b1)