Running an EC2 instance locally using LocalStack

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.

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Mounting local directories for ECS tasks with LocalStack

LocalStack's cloud emulator lets you run Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) clusters and tasks on your local computer. It's sometimes useful to mount code from the host filesystem directly into the ECS container. This helps quickly test changes without needing to rebuild and redeploy the ECS Task's Docker image each time. This video explains how to use code mounting with the ECS bind mounts feature.

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LocalStack Neptune development with G.V() — Gremlin IDE

We’re partnering with gdotv to simplify development with our Amazon Neptune cloud emulator component. You can now easily query, visualise and model your graph data either interactively or using the Gremlin querying language with G.V() - Gremlin IDE. With G.V(), you can considerably enhance your graph database development experience whilst gaining access to a powerful reporting and visualisation toolset for your production data. With LocalStack’s core cloud emulator, parity is ensured between a local Neptune instance and AWS’s own, meaning Gremlin queries in your development environment will behave identically on Amazon Neptune. In this video we demonstrate how to use G.V() with LocalStack Neptune.

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Local Debugging for Lambda Functions via new Lambda Debug Mode

Debugging serverless functions has always been challenging, often requiring repeated invocations, extensive log tracing, and cloud deployments to diagnose an issue. The new Lambda Debug Mode in LocalStack changes this by allowing developers to debug AWS Lambda functions directly in their IDE, with breakpoints, variable inspection, and step-through execution, without leaving their local environment. In this presentation, Marco Edoardo Palma provides a hands-on demo of Lambda Debug Mode—from debugging standalone functions to handling multi-function workflows. Learn how this developer-first approach makes debugging serverless applications faster, smoother, and more intuitive.

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