3 Things You Need to Know About LocalStack

As you are likely aware, LocalStack has made some major changes to our LocalStack for AWS product recently. As with any big change, there is sometimes confusion around some of the finer details. This post aims to share 3 important facts about LocalStack that you should know.

1. LocalStack for AWS is Free for Hobbyists, Students & Open Source

LocalStack has always been helpful for developers and aspiring developers to hone their AWS skills and to build personal projects. It’s also been an indispensable tool for many open source maintainers whose projects rely on AWS infrastructure or serve an AWS developer user base. The good news is that, for both, LocalStack is still completely free.

Individual hobbyist developers can sign up for a free Hobby tier account and access over 30 emulated AWS services, including S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, and many more. You can sign up for free, no credit card required, right here.
Open source project maintainers can actually get access to the full Ultimate tier license that covers the complete list of LocalStack for AWS’s emulated services, as well as emulator enhancements such as persistence and team collaboration via Cloud Pods. You can get details on qualifications and how to apply on our LocalStack for Open Source page.
Students also have free access to the full suite of LocalStack emulated services and enhancements to assist in their learning and skill development. This is available via our collaboration with the GitHub Student Developer Pack. If you’re a student, learn how you can access this benefit via our LocalStack for Students page.

2. LocalStack Has No CI limits

One of the biggest benefits of using LocalStack for AWS is the speed and cost savings when running integration tests in CI. We’ve heard stories directly from users about how LocalStack took a 40+ minute deployment that spun up a real AWS environment with real (i.e., not free) resources and brought that down to just a matter of minutes with no cloud costs.

However, we heard from our community that our previous system of CI credits–in which the user’s license established a limit on the number of CI builds per month–had become an unnecessary barrier to adopting LocalStack in CI/CD.

In case you missed the news, as of our latest release, we have eliminated CI credit limits on all tiers – yes, that means the Hobby tier too! We strongly believe LocalStack can dramatically improve your automated testing, and don’t want to set arbitrary limits on that.

3. LocalStack for AWS Is Continuously Validated for API Accuracy

At LocalStack, we’ve been building an AWS emulator since 2016. Over years of improvement and refinement, we’ve developed processes, an architecture, and tests that allow us to closely monitor AWS API changes across all services. Our team of engineers is able to quickly adjust our emulator to accommodate these changes, and then we leverage a comprehensive suite of tests to validate each API for accuracy.

For example, here’s a quick look at the number of tests for just a small selection of the most used AWS services (S3, Lambda, SQS and DynamoDB):

localstack services pass thousands of individual tests

These tests help ensure we maintain a high degree of API accuracy.

We don’t just rely on test suites either. Over the years, we’ve built a reputation that has helped us establish relationships with AWS that have enabled us, in multiple cases, to release new service features on the same day they are released by AWS.