Local development and testing are significant for engineers who wish to ship confidently onto production environments. Test-driven development (TDD) has been adopted as an essential practice to enforce that and ensure that every code change is validated locally and on CI. This is where we arrive at the Testcontainers libraries that support your tests, providing lightweight, ephemeral instances of common databases, message brokers, web browsers, or anything else that can run in a Docker container. With Testcontainers, available in different popular languages: Java, Go, .NET, JavaScript/Typescript, and Python, you can replicate the production environment on your local machine and test everything (including AWS APIs powered by LocalStack)! Testcontainers ensure that the data access layer, user interface, and application are tested well at each step. In this session, we have looked at Testcontainers and how to adopt them to develop our applications locally and run our integration tests while using LocalStack to provision cloud resources inside a Docker container before pushing your application to production! In the end, we have also discussed how LocalStack and the Java version of Testcontainers play nicely with each other and wind up with updates about the all-new LocalStack release!

With the growing Serverless workloads, managing and maintaining them is best recommended with Infrastructure as Code (IaC). While this holds the complete infrastructure and its configurations, we could have events from one service destined to another via configuration. When building these configurations, we could also reduce the application code making it more maintainable and scalable. In this session, Jones walked us through a fully end-to-end solution built with Amazon EventBridge and AWS Step Functions with SDK integrations which have helped him to improvise the application with just IaC and very minimal application code.

Tired of rebuilding your stack from scratch every time you run tests or restart your dev environment? In this episode, we dive into Cloud Pods, LocalStack’s powerful state management feature. You’ll learn how to snapshot your entire LocalStack environment (services, resources, data), restore that exact state across machines, teams, or CI runs, speed up test cycles and workflows, and use Cloud Pods to make testing in CI/CD faster and more reliable. Cloud Pods let you freeze your infrastructure in time. Perfect for repeatable tests, isolated dev environments, or onboarding new teammates.

dbt (Data Build Tool) helps data engineers manage data transformations using modular SQL and brings version control, testing, and documentation to their transformation logic. However, running dbt against production data warehouses like Snowflake can be slow, expensive, and risky. This session introduces a new way to develop and test dbt workflows locally using the Snowflake emulator in LocalStack. You'll learn how to set up a local dbt environment, configure dbt to connect to the Snowflake emulator, run and validate dbt models locally without using a real Snowflake account, and iterate quickly on transformations before pushing them to production. Through a hands-on factory app example, we’ll walk through how to use the Snowflake emulator to run dbt models on your laptop, helping you test logic, catch issues early, and reduce cloud costs.