
You’ve been there: Your Unit tests pass both locally and in CI. You deploy with confidence. You thought.. Then staging in the real cloud reveals the truth—bugs that only show up with actual RDS parameter settings, real SQS and SNS throughput limits, or Lambda and API Gateway behaviour your local mocks never captured.
The solution is Testcontainers.
Testcontainers is a testing library that provides easy and lightweight APIs for bootstrapping integration tests with real services wrapped in Docker containers. Using Testcontainers, you can write tests talking to the same type of services you use in production without mocks or in-memory services. Spin them up, run migrations, execute your Node.js service against them, assert results, auto-cleanup.

LocalStack now provides enhanced support for running AWS services in Kubernetes environments. In this presentation from the LocalStack 4.0 community meetup by Simon Walker, we explore how to deploy and manage local AWS resources within Kubernetes clusters with LocalStack, to help developers maintain consistency between development and production environments.The session further covers LocalStack’s Kubernetes integration, including deployment via Helm charts, configuration of services like Lambda and RDS as Kubernetes pods, and networking between components. A demo illustrates provisioning a serverless application (Lambda functions interacting with a MySQL database) using Terraform, with all resources managed within a local Kubernetes cluster.You'll additionally learn the practical approaches for local testing and infrastructure emulation by moving from Docker to Kubernetes-native solutions as well as upcoming features, including broader service support and new container runtime options.## Resources- Documentation: https://docs.localstack.cloud/user-guide/localstack-enterprise/kubernetes-executor/- Get access: https://www.localstack.cloud/contact

About a year ago we have released the first version of LocalStack Extensions: Extensions are a powerful mechanism to plug additional functionality into LocalStack - ranging from additional service emulators, to value-add features like Chaos Engineering, request logging, cloud resource replication/proxying, and more.Over the last couple of months we have been experimenting with a LocalStack Snowflake emulator extension, which allows to develop and test your Snowflake data pipelines entirely on your local machine!In this talk, Waldemar discusses and demonstrates how you can develop your Snowflake data pipelines locally with LocalStack.

Terraform 1.6 introduced native Terraform tests, but running them against real cloud resources leads to long deployment times and unnecessary costs. With LocalStack's Terraform integration (tflocal), you can validate configurations locally while closely emulating real cloud behaviour. By combining Terraform tests with LocalStack, developers can run integration tests in CI/CD environments, test event-driven serverless workflows, and establish a rapid feedback loop for cloud development.In this presentation, Harsh Mishra provides a hands-on demo of Terraform testing with LocalStack, exploring how to configure tests, validate infrastructure locally, and reduce costs and complexity while improving confidence in deployments.## Resources- Blog: https://blog.localstack.cloud/efficient-infrastructure-testing-localstack-terraform-tests-framework/- Documentation: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/tests- tflocal: https://docs.localstack.cloud/user-guide/integrations/terraform/#tflocal-wrapper-script