
You've been there: Lambda triggers, SQS messages fly, Step Functions execute, and somewhere in the middle, something breaks. You have no idea what triggered what, what payload was passed, or where it all went wrong.
That's the black box problem of AWS development.
Once your architecture grows beyond a single service, visibility disappears fast. You're left stitching together scattered logs and redeploying just to see what's going on.
App Inspector is LocalStack's built-in observability layer that opens up that black box. It gives you a real-time, unified view of every service interaction happening inside your local cloud: what triggered what, with what payload, in what order.
In this talk, we'll walk through what App Inspector is, how it fits into your LocalStack workflow, and how to use it to catch bugs locally before they ever reach staging or production.

Most people think the cloud is just files floating in the sky.Spoiler: it's not.In this episode, I’m breaking down what “the cloud” really is, why everything you’ve been told is probably wrong, and why it's the engine behind everything from Netflix to AI to your online checkout.This is the kickoff to WTH is the Cloud?! a fun series that makes cloud technology make sense.

Ever wonder why some teams intentionally break their own systems? Welcome to the world of chaos engineering — a practice that's not just for Netflix-scale infrastructure, but for any team that wants to build resilient, reliable applications.In this session, we'll demystify chaos engineering and explain why intentionally breaking things is actually the smart move. You'll learn:What chaos engineering really is (in plain English, no buzzwords)Why waiting for production failures is a terrible strategyHow to start experimenting with controlled failure locally, before it happens in the wildReal-world examples of chaos experiments that catch bugs you'd never find in traditional testingTools and techniques to get started without blowing up your infrastructureThrough practical demos using LocalStack's cloud emulation and chaos engineering tools, we'll simulate failures like network latency, service outages, and resource exhaustion right from your laptop.If you've ever said "it worked on my machine" only to watch it crash in production, this talk is for you—let's break things intentionally so they don't break unexpectedly.

Testing in the cloud = slow builds, fragile staging, surprise bills.Let’s talk about how developers are flipping the script and using local cloud environments to test smarter, faster, and cheaper — without breaking production.Bonus: You’ll learn how LocalStack lets you simulate AWS on your machine. Game changer.