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 strategy, how to start experimenting with controlled failure locally, before it happens in the wild, real-world examples of chaos experiments that catch bugs you'd never find in traditional testing, and tools and techniques to get started without blowing up your infrastructure. Through 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.

In this hands-on session, you’ll learn how to level up your serverless development by integrating the AWS Toolkit for VS Code with LocalStack — enabling faster Lambda development, debugging, and testing without needing a live AWS account. 👨💻 Featuring: Joel Scheuner, Senior Software Engineer at LocalStack, will show you how to configure the AWS Toolkit for VS Code to connect with LocalStack, deploy and test Lambda functions locally with full AWS emulation, set breakpoints and debug functions right from your IDE, and iterate quickly on code changes with minimal setup overhead. You’ll also hear from an AWS engineer sharing real-world insights and best practices for modern serverless workflows. Whether you’re new to serverless or already deep in AWS development, this session will help you code with confidence and streamline your Lambda workflow from start to finish — all from your laptop.

LocalStack is a cloud service emulator designed for local development and testing of cloud applications. With LocalStack, you can test AWS CloudWatch metric alarms, to get notified on infrastructure failures — all on your local machine! In this video, you will learn how you can use a CloudWatch metric alarm to get notified automatically when your Lambda function invocations fail. You will also set up an email notification using the Simple Email Service (SES) and our Mailhog extension.

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.