FAQ

This is a great question. The main reason is that you can now have multiple AWS accounts, multiple regions, and multiple LocalStack instances all living in one place. You can instantly switch between accounts to compare your system in development versus production, or to compare your LocalStack environment to your AWS development environment.

We also offer tools to test out your lambda connections, like placing a file into an S3 bucket and viewing the resulting Lambda CloudWatch logs. Or saving a record to DynamoDB and viewing the DyanmoDB Streams invoked Lambda’s CloudWatch Logs. There is also over 20 different ER and System diagrams that help to better explain your system. These can all be downloaded as png files so that you can use them in decks.

Lastly, just being able to view your data in S3, DynamoDB, RedShift, Athena, and CloudWatch Logs on both AWS and LocalStack is just really convenient. Save a record into DynamoDB from code, and instantly verify it in Commandeer!

We know there are, this was an ambitious undertaking. We don’t cover them all the services that AWS offers, but we are rapidly expanding the offering. Our best and most popular services are S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, CloudWatch Logs, CloudFormation, EventBridge, and SQS. We also offer a great UI for querying RedShift, Athena, and Postgres.

We can import your .aws/credentials files and connect with your access keys. If you have a session token, this can also be used, and if it updates in your file, we will auto-update it in the app. Lastly, if you need to assume a role, we also allow for this. This is often the way that larger organizations control access to AWS.

Yes, totally. One of the main use cases of Commandeer is that we provide the same UI for looking at your system in LocalStack as in AWS. For instance, you can query a DynamoDB table in either and view the results, edit the data, and download it.

Yes. Serverless development, and micro-service architectures are very fun to develop, but pretty tough to manage. From connections between services, to using IaC to deploy your infrastructure, to being able to test events, there is a lot of things that can go wrong. We don’t claim to solve all your needs. Internally, we still use a number of different tools including Ansible, Terraform, Serverless Framework, Serverless Stack and more to build systems. Being able to check that things deployed correctly, and test out connections in a systematic way is priceless. Lastly, we eat, sleep, and drink this stuff. So if you do have a question or a feature request, we can help you out.

Call us old-fashioned, but before the new age of using VC capital, or offering services for free, so that companies could turn around and sell your data, there was just one way to do things. Offer a good or service that people needed, and they in turned paid you for this. In terms of pricing, we feel that it is quite reasonable. We charge 3 times what Netflix does. The difference is that our tool helps provide immediate gains for your livelihood, Netflix simply steals your time for a subsidized price. We love Ozarks too, but we are trying to offer a service to help you get back some of your precious time!

But yes, we charge because we use the subscription money to reinvest back into the product. We are constantly adding new features and further refining the system month over month for over 2 years now. Your subscription helps keep this going, and we greatly appreciate it!

Yes, we do have a team offering. It enables you to invite your colleagues to one unified billing Commandeer account. This means that if you are a Director or VP of Engineering, you can add your team to one account, and provide them all with the gift of visibility into AWS.

We use best practices at every turn to ensure that your data remains your own. Your systems manager should be responsible for ensuring that you use role based arn's and provide the least amount of access to data.

We NEVER store any of your data on our servers. The only thing we collect is your profile, subscription information, and page view and button click events. The first two are needed to let us manage the business. We use Auth0 and Stripe for these. The analytics allow us to know what people are using the most, and build out more features based on that.