How to Build for the Cloud on Your Laptop!

Waldemar Hummer is Co-Founder and CTO at LocalStack. LocalStack gives you a fully functional local cloud stack so you can develop and test your cloud and serverless apps offline. LocalStack is an open-source project that started at Atlassian, where its initial purpose was to keep developers productive on their daily commutes despite poor internet connectivity.

LocalStack emulates AWS cloud services on your laptop, increasing the number of phases in your infrastructure environment to four: local, test, staging, and production—with LocalStack efficiently covering the local and test phases (including CI builds). LocalStack also integrates with a large set of other cloud tools, such as Terraform, Pulumi, and CDK.

While the commute problem went mostly away with COVID, it became clear that a local development environment has speed, quality, and cost advantages. Local provisioning of resources is faster and can speed up dev feedback cycles by an order of magnitude. Developers can start their work without IAM enforcement, then later introduce security policies and migrate to the cloud. A local environment also reduces the cost of cloud sandbox accounts.

A key requirement for LocalStack to be valuable is parity with cloud provider services, which means replicating services and API responses. LocalStack is built in Python, and Waldemar walks us through LocalStack's process of building out the platform to have 99% parity with AWS.

In this episode, we also cover developer marketing, community building, and how LocalStack amassed over 44,000 stars on GitHub. Waldemar takes us through both a live LocalStack demo and a deep-dive into LocalStack's GitHub repository.