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

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

Welcome to the September-October 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 wins:

• LocalStack is now officially part of the GitHub Student Developer Pack: Students around the world can now access LocalStack as part of their dev toolkit. What better opportunity to contribute to our docs, as you build and test cloud apps locally for free? 🎒 💻

• LocalStack is participating in Hacktoberfest 2025 🎃: Want to contribute to LocalStack Docs? Give back to open source and score some exclusive LocalStack swag!

HacktoberFest with LocalStack 2025

HacktoberFest is back! 🎃

This year, LocalStack is coming through with contribution issues for docs and sample apps. These contributions are perfect for anybody who loves open source and wants to get hands-on with cloud emulation.

Ready to contribute and win some LocalStack swag? 🎁 Your swag opportunity awaits here. 🎁

Community & Internal Contributions

OSS Community

We’re absolutely thrilled to announce how thanks to our amazing contributors for HacktoberFest 2025, we’ve received numerous OSS contributions to our docs!

Huge thanks to:

• Arya Pratap Singh: Normalize S3 static website with Terraform tutorial structure (PR #272)
• Anik Chand: Normalize structure: Add Introduction and Testing sections (PR #268)
• Abhiraj Adhikary: Normalize structure: elb-load-balancing (PR #267)
• Hark: Add Architecture Diagram and Testing Section to Ephemeral Application Previews Tutorial (PR #266)
• Hussain Tinwala: Add Full Tutorial Page for Terraform Serverless Shipment App (PR #265)
• Gagan Deep: Simulating outages documentation updated (PR #263)
• Md Waqib Sk: Normalize structure: Build & deploy Lambda container images (ECR) (PR #260)
• Aditya Sriram Bhaskara: Expand page: Lambda + S3 Image Resizer (Hot Reload) (PR #259)
• Sccalabr: Normalize structure: Generate IAM Policies with IAM Policy (PR #258)
• Tharun K: Normalize structure: Chaos Engineering Route 53 Failover (PR #257)

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:

• New documentation for API Integrations in Snowflake
• New documentation for CRUD support in Snowflake resource monitors
• New documentation for Secrets in Snowflake
• New documentation for CRUD support for masking policies in Snowflake
• New documentation for Openflow in Snowflake
• New documentation for network rules in Snowflake
• New and Improved: Snowflake + LocalStack Quickstart Guide
• Added student plan to the LocalStack for AWS plans’ matrix in licensing and tiers
• Updated Apache MQ docs to bump Active MQ version to 5.18.7 because this is the current version on AWS with no known vulnerabilities.
• AWS service parity updates, deprecation notices, and improved coverage

A huge shoutout to Sannya Singal, Nikos, Giovanni Grano, Przemek Denkiewicz, Gentris Leci, George Tsiolis, 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 4.9 and Snow 1.2

We published new release notes for LocalStack for AWS v4.9.0 and Snow 1.2:

• Read the AWS v4.9.0 release notes
• Read the Snow v1.2 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)

We had over 3,600 users ran more than 8,000 searches. Top interests centered on Lambda debugging, S3, SQS, and Snowflake integrations—highlighting strong demand for core AWS and data features.

• 3,638 unique users ran 8,326 searches
• Top queries:
  • lambda function debugging (88 (4.4%))
  • s3 (86 (4.3%))
  • sqs (49 (2.5%))
  • snowflake integration with localstack (45 (2.3%))
  • lambda (36 (1.8%))
  • docker (34 (1.7%))

🤖 Kapa Bot Questions

We had 852 questions from 216 users. These questions focused mainly on Lambda deployments, DynamoDB commands, Snowflake queries, and Podman usage—revealing recurring pain points in setup, configuration, and integration.

• 852 total questions from 216 unique users
• Top user pain points:
  • I just created my simulated localstack environment with Dynamo DB. Could you tell me the commands I can use to create tables, etc.?
  • I’m creating a simulation environment in localstack and I’ve created my lambda, I have it in zip format but the size is too big and I can’t inject it, can I change that?
  • Can I use localstack with snowflake for doing select statements on tables?
  • How do I run podman with localstack?

Looking Ahead

This month’s docs updates reflect the power of community—especially as we welcome new contributors through Hacktoberfest 2025 and expand access through our partnership with the GitHub Student Developer Pack. We’re excited to see more students and open‑source enthusiasts jump in, break things, learn fast, and help make our documentation even better.

As we move forward, we’re focused on nurturing this growing community of contributors, making docs more accessible, and supporting developers who are eager to learn and build with LocalStack.