What’s New in LocalStack Docs: August-September 2025

What’s New in LocalStack Docs: August–September 2025

Welcome to the August–September edition of What’s New in LocalStack Docs! This is our new monthly tradition at LocalStack where we highlight the people, changes, and insights shaping our documentation. We care deeply about docs because they help our customers and community discover what’s possible, troubleshoot faster, and get the most out of LocalStack.

This month, we’re especially excited to highlight two huge new developer experience wins:

• The LocalStack Toolkit for VS Code: a native extension that helps you install, configure, and run LocalStack right inside VS Code.

• Our new Lambda Remote Debugging guide: built in partnership with the AWS Toolkit team, this lets you set breakpoints and step through Python, Node.js, or Java Lambda functions in your IDE while they run in LocalStack.

Together, these docs and tools unlock a smoother, faster onboarding and debugging workflow for developers who live in VS Code… and we’re just getting started!

You’ll also find updates to AWS parity coverage, Snowflake API automation, UX fixes across the docs site, fresh usage insights, and our latest AWS release notes.

Community & Internal Contributions

OSS Community

We had two OSS contributions this cycle. Huge thanks to:

• Yoshiaki Yoshida: Fixed a broken Markdown format in the Cloud Control API docs (PR #174)

• @sopgreg: Added documentation for FIFO queue creation in SQS (PR #193)

As a reminder, our new docs repo is now at github.com/localstack/localstack-docs, and it’s 100% open source. We welcome your contributions, issues, and suggestions!

Internal Contributors

We shipped a flurry of updates across AWS and Snowflake, from infrastructure and layout fixes to brand-new features and automations:

• New documentation for the LocalStack Toolkit for VS Code
• New guide for Lambda Remote Debugging in VS Code using AWS Toolkit
• Documented our new CloudFormation engine, now built around Change Sets
• AWS service parity updates, deprecation notices, and improved coverage
• Revamped EKS docs with a note on using k3d for LoadBalancer support
• Updated AWS Batch service docs to reflect new ECS runtime
• Fixed incorrect artifact prefix in Pro pipeline metrics
• Added feature-coverage automation for Snowflake REST APIs via GitHub workflows
• Continued improvements for our redirect logic from our v1 → v2 docs migration
• Restored missing right padding in the sidebar to match design specs
• Added a “Get Started” CTA in the top nav to drive sign-ups (with Snowflake tracking param)
• Redesigned the Sample Apps landing page for better UX
• Updated and linked Mailhog docs from the extensions overview

A huge shoutout to Marko Macerl, Anastasia Dusak, Przemek Denkiewicz, Gentris Leci, George Tsiolis, Eduardo Delgado, Dominik Schubert, Brian Rinaldi, Harsh Mishra, and Alex Rashed for driving these improvements and continuing to level up the docs experience for all developers.

Release Notes: LocalStack for AWS 4.8

We published new release notes for LocalStack for AWS v4.8.0: Read the release notes

As always, huge thanks to Harsh Mishra for running our release notes process with such rigor and attention to detail. Thanks to him, our changelogs are in good hands.

User Trends & Search Insights

Our docs traffic and search behavior continue to show strong signals about what developers care about most.

📊 Site Search (Algolia)

• 813 unique users ran 1.64K searches
• Top queries: s3 (4.2%), sqs (2.6%), lambda (2.2%), docker (2.0%), awslocal (1.8%), dynamo (1.2%)

These trends continue to reinforce the importance of deep coverage for core AWS services and our local tooling ecosystem.

🤖 Kapa Bot Questions

• 887 total questions from 255 unique users
• Top user pain points:
  • How to use SAM Local for a project
  • Running Lambdas with Podman instead of Docker
  • Connecting API Gateway and SQS in the Free tier
  • Debugging web app connection issues (e.g. TLS/cert or CORS)
  • SSL certificate validation failures in SDKs
  • Terraform state mismatch when mixing CLI and IaC

We’re using these patterns to proactively improve troubleshooting content, clarify limitations, and better support for non-Docker setups.

What’s Ahead for LocalStack Docs

We’re eager to hear what you think.

The launch of the LocalStack Toolkit for VS Code and our new Lambda Remote Debugging integration (via AWS Toolkit) marks a big step toward making the LocalStack experience more seamless, interactive, and IDE-native.

But this is just the beginning and we’d love to hear your feedback.

• What’s working well?
• Where are you getting stuck?
• What would make local Lambda debugging and setup even smoother?

We’re building these tools with our community, and your insights help shape what we improve next. If you’ve tried either the Toolkit or the new debugging flow, let us know! Open an issue, drop a note in our Community Slack, or give us a ⭐ on the VS Code Marketplace.

Let’s keep leveling up the local cloud dev experience together.