Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Pro

LocalStack Pro supports the Docker backend for running instances.

The Docker backend uses the Docker Engine to emulate EC2 instances. All limitations that apply to containers apply to EC2 instances backed by the Docker manager, including root access and networking. Access to the Docker socket is required which can be made available to LocalStack by mounting the socket file during launch.

Instances have the Docker socket (/var/run/docker.sock) mounted inside them, making Docker-in-Docker use cases possible.

Base Images

LocalStack uses a naming scheme to recognise and manage the containers and images associated with it. Containers are named localstack-ec2.<InstanceId>, while images are tagged localstack-ec2/<AmiName>:<AmiId>.

AWS EC2 provides a default set of AMIs from which new AMIs can be created. This can be replicated within LocalStack by tagging an existing Docker image with a compatible name, for example:

$ docker tag ubuntu:focal localstack-ec2/ubuntu-focal-ami:ami-000001

The AMI ami-000001 will then be available for use.

Networking

LocalStack supports assignment of unique private IP addresses for Dockerised instances. To leverage this feature, it is necessary to run the LocalStack daemon process on the host which takes care of creating and managing networking on the host system.

$ pip install localstack[runtime]
$ export LOCALSTACK_API_KEY=...
$ localstack daemons start

The address for SSH access to the instance is printed in the logs when the instance is initialised.

2022-03-21T14:46:49.540:INFO:localstack_ext.services.ec2.vmmanager.docker: Instance i-f6a80f48 will be accessible via SSH at: 192.168.123.25:22, 127.0.0.1:48805

If the LocalStack daemon is not running, the instance will be only accessible over SSH at 127.0.0.1 and the specified port.

LocalStack daemon is supported on Linux and MacOS.

Ports other than 22 (SSH) are currently not exposed from the Dockerised instances.

Operations

The Docker backend supports following operations: