For years, one of our biggest challenges was explaining local cloud development to cloud application developers. In our early days, we’d explain the local AWS emulator we were building and get some incredulous replies. “Why would anyone emulate the cloud locally?” was a common response.
However, once we demonstrated the speed and improved developer experience of local cloud development, people quickly changed their minds. In many cases, those initial skeptics became long-time customers who publicly advocate for LocalStack.
Lately, more developers than ever are embracing local cloud development. It’s an exciting time.
AWS Emulator: A milestone for the community
This week, AWS announced AWS Emulator, which runs AWS services locally to help developers and AI agents build and test faster. AWS built, tested and reviewed it entirely with AI agents, which is impressive on its own. The fact that the output was a local AWS emulator intended to help support agentic workflows only validates how far this community has come.
LocalStack pioneered local AWS emulation in 2017, with the release of LocalStack for AWS. For years, developers building AWS applications–and even developers working for AWS–have relied on LocalStack to iterate, validate, and ship reliable code to their production AWS environment.
That’s why the engineers behind AWS Emulator invited us to collaborate on their announcement. The introduction of a local AWS emulator actually backed by AWS creates real opportunities to work together on standards for this community. Our co-founder and CTO Waldemar Hummer said so in the blog announcing AWS Emulator:
“At LocalStack, we believe that cloud development should be fast, local, and accessible to every developer. AWS’s investment in local cloud emulation is a testament to the role of local cloud development for the AWS community. We believe there’s a significant opportunity to move the ecosystem forward together, from improving emulator fidelity and establishing open testing standards to integrating emulators of all kinds into the development experience our users rely on. LocalStack is excited to work with AWS to build on this vision of a unified emulator ecosystem.”
As we’ve grown from our early days as a basic local AWS emulator into a local cloud development platform supporting multiple clouds, we’ve watched this community evolve just as well. Agentic AI has only heightened the need for local cloud development that has driven the growth of this community.
The release of the AWS Emulator is a recognition of that progress. We want to congratulate AWS on this milestone, and we look forward to collaborating on the future of local AWS emulation.
Now that we’ve spent some time to review AWS Emulator in-depth, we’re sharing answers to some frequently asked questions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is AWS Emulator a replacement for LocalStack for AWS?
No. AWS Emulator is focused on running AWS services locally. LocalStack is a cloud development platform built to help customers use local cloud emulators for AWS, Azure, and Snowflake for more effective development and testing.
In addition to its local AWS emulator, LocalStack includes IaC integrations, a web app with resource browsers, IDE integrations, and a suite of capabilities for testing and debugging.
From a technical perspective, the two are built differently, so the better fit depends on what you need to emulate.
What does LocalStack provide that AWS Emulator does not?
LocalStack is a local cloud development platform that supports emulators for AWS, Azure, and Snowflake (with support for SaaS applications coming soon–stay tuned!).
That includes a unique development experience that makes local cloud development more effective than local AWS emulators on their own, including:
- Persistence & state management
- IAM policy automation
- Observability in development environments
- Resiliency testing via our Chaos Engineering APIs
- Secure delivery
- Kubernetes distribution
- Support for multi-cloud teams
Essentially, local cloud emulators enable developers and AI agents to do the same cloud development they’ve always done, just without the cloud dependency. LocalStack provides that in an experience that unlocks faster, more effective, and more comprehensive testing and debugging.
How does LocalStack for AWS service coverage compare with that of AWS Emulator?
They take different approaches to coverage. AWS Emulator emphasizes breadth, with a very wide range of AWS services. LocalStack emphasizes depth on the services most teams build on, including areas like IAM, so many complex workloads may behave more like real AWS. We’d encourage you to review the specific services and behaviors your application relies on against each emulator as you consider your options.
Is LocalStack for AWS paywalled?
No! We have several options to use LocalStack for free to support select use cases:
- Hobby plan: Free access for non-commercial work, including base level development experience features. Check out our pricing page to learn more.
- LocalStack for Students: Free access to entitlements available in our Ultimate plan available to students participating in the GitHub Student Developer Pack. Check out this page to learn more.
- LocalStack for Open Source: We offer free access to licenses in our paid packages for developers supporting open source projects. Check out this page to learn more.
We also offer a 30-day free trial for LocalStack for AWS and LocalStack for Snowflake, so you can test it out before deciding on a paid plan. And LocalStack for Azure is currently in public preview, so anyone can sign up and get started today.
