LocalStack’s core cloud emulator allows us to run our own cloud application - including its infrastructure - locally, which provides an efficient developer experience at the start of the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC). This experience enables us to build our product features in a way that closely matches what our customers are looking for — a comprehensive developer platform that facilitates local multi-cloud development across different providers and services. In this session from LocalStack Community Meetup April '24, Lukas Pichler showcases how to use the LocalStack core cloud emulator and other novel solutions, to build, test, and integrate new features in our LocalStack Web Application. He covers an application overview, how we enable local cloud development, how we use LocalStack in CI, and how we use LocalStack to enable application previews and E2E testing.

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.

In this video, you'll learn how you can run an Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance locally using LocalStack's core cloud emulator. Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a core service within Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides scalable and flexible virtual computing resources. EC2 enables users to launch and manage virtual servers, commonly referred to as instances. LocalStack is a core cloud emulator that allows you run EC2 instances using a Docker backend. Under the hood, LocalStack spins another Docker container that mimics an EC2 instance functionality, including other add-on features such as EBS, IMDS, and Load Balancers. Corrections: LocalStack will no longer provide the Ubuntu 20.04 Docker AMI (used in this video) by default in the next major release, though it can still be manually added, and on nine minutes & nine seconds mark, we meant 'localhost' instead of 'localstack'. To access the web server, you can hit the localhost:8000 endpoint as shown in the video.

Get started with LocalStack in minutes! In this episode, we’ll clone a ready-to-go AWS sample app, spin up LocalStack, and run everything locally without a cloud account. By the end, you’ll have a fully functional event-driven app running on your machine.