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.

Cloud pods are persistent state snapshots of your LocalStack instance that can easily be stored, versioned, shared, and restored. They can be used to save and manage snapshots of active LocalStack instances, share state snapshots with your team to debug collectively, automate your testing pipelines by pre-seeding CI environments, and create reproducible development and testing environments locally. In this session from LocalStack Community Meetup July '24, Bart Szydlowski explores how to use Cloud Pods to accelerate your cloud development & testing. He showcases how you can get started with Cloud Pods, integrate them into your testing pipelines, and make it easy for your team members to be onboarded to your cloud infrastructure — running all on your local machine!

In this session, Maximillian Hoheiser discussed developing & testing AWS Data Streaming with LocalStack! In this talk, he focused on Kinesis Data Firehose, an AWS service that allows you to extract, transform, and load streaming data into various destinations like Amazon S3. He dived into how to set up testing for Kinesis Firehose and seamlessly integrated it with other services using Boto3 and CDK/CloudFormation. Maximillian led a live demonstration, showcasing how to set up a practical business case, implement it, and rigorously test it using LocalStack.

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!