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.

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.

Why wait for the cloud to test your app? In this episode, we’ll write and run an integration test to validate our LocalStack app. You’ll learn how to upload a file, trigger the Lambda-SQS-DynamoDB flow, and assert the results all locally.