Can I test locally when developing for Amazon Elastic Beanstalk?

Question

I am trying to get started with Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk and as I learn more about it, it seems like I will not be able to test my webapp locally. I understand I can build a war file and run it in a local Tomcat, but it looks like once I need a datastore (I want to use dynamodb) I will have to connect to aws. Ideally I would be able to run a test instance locally (not having to connect to aws to test). Is that a reasonable thing to do or am I going about this wrong?

Answer 1

So I finally got around to sending a message to Amazon about this. Someone got back to me quickly, telling me that I must be connected to AWS services to do this sort of development work.

Answer 2

The checked answer is correct - it is not possible to run AWS services locally. I'm adding more information and references. Just by way of comparison, Google App Engine which I also use does provide this capability and I have found it incredibly useful.

A few months ago someone named Wade on the AWS developer relations team solicited feedback from the developer community on what mocks would be useful for developers for this purpose.

Amazon Elastic Bean Stalk does support integrated debugging using the Eclipse IDE. If you have a good Internet connection and squint your eyes, it almost feels like you're running locally.

But, I think there may be a solution to what the original question was really trying to do. I do this all the time. I connect my locally running Tomcat instance to a remote Amazon hosted datastore instance by modifying the database security appropriately. At first I was worried about performance, but it's been really fast for me. And you effectively get local debugging while connecting to a remote data source.