Building & testing Cloud applications locally using LocalStack

Speaker: Harsh Bardhan

Track: Testing

Type: Remote Talk

Room: Talk Room 3 (Remote Talks)

Time: Oct 13 (Thu): 11:30

Duration: 0:45

With the dominance of various cloud service providers, engineering teams across the globe are looking to focus their time and energy on optimizing their cloud development, testing & deployment workflows. It is often slow and tedious and doesn't serve the purpose, with teams left to demystify their cloud development workflows to be more efficient. These traditional deploy & test cycles often lead to an inefficient idle time where deployment needs to be triggered more than once during testing & debugging.

LocalStack is a cloud service emulator that runs in a single container on your laptop or in your CI environment. Using LocalStack, you can spin up a local test environment in seconds and get the same functionality you would get from a real AWS environment. With over 41,000+ GitHub Stargazers and 10,000+ users worldwide, LocalStack supports many AWS services, like AWS Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, Kinesis, SQS, SNS, and many more!

Apart from supporting engineers in improving their inefficient development & testing loops, LocalStack also has a lot of exciting development around our core Python stack. This talk will demonstrate Amazon Service Framework (ASF), our in-built service which allows us to add support for new AWS services in LocalStack and update existing ones. Using the Botocore's availability of a low-level interface of AWS APIs, ASF automates the process of updating our APIs using the LocalStack edge proxy service.

The content of the talk would be:

• Introduction to LocalStack [3 minutes]
• Exploring AWS services in LocalStack [3 minutes]
• Utilizing LocalStack integrations & services [7 minutes]
  • Lambda & Terraform Integration for local deployment
  • Hot reloading Python Lambda functions locally
• Understanding Amazon Service Framework (ASF) [5 minutes]
  • Introduction to ASF
  • Generating LocalStack APIs for a new AWS service using ASF
• Advanced use-cases of LocalStack [7 minutes]
  • Configuring LocalStack to further emulate AWS services
  • Exploring Persistence Mechanism to pause and resume application state
• Q&A (5 minutes)

In this talk, we will be covering some of these AWS services and how you can use LocalStack to turbocharge your development & testing workflows. We will also cover how you can contribute back to LocalStack using Amazon Service Framework and how we built it from scratch to prevent your applications from breaking while moving from testing to production.