Overview

LocalStack provides a cloud service emulator that runs within a single container on your local machine or CI environment. It delivers a functional AWS environment including Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, SQS, and 80+ supported services, enabling development and testing without an AWS account or cloud-related costs.

Core Use Cases

• Accelerate development loops: Test changes against local AWS services instantly to bypass deployment wait times.
• Automate integration testing: Execute integration tests against local AWS infrastructure within pull requests to identify regressions before production.
• Validate IaC: Deploy Terraform, CDK, or CloudFormation templates to LocalStack to verify infrastructure logic before applying changes to a cloud environment.
• Experimental sandbox: Explore new AWS services and architectures in a risk-free environment.

LocalStack also provides advanced features for team collaboration and security, including Cloud Pods for state management, IAM policy enforcement, and Chaos Engineering.

Explore by deployment

Local Development

Install LocalStack on a workstation and deploy a serverless application using Lambda and DynamoDB.

CI/CD Pipelines

Integrate LocalStack into GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or other container-based CI platforms for automated testing.

AI & Agent Workflows

Integrate LocalStack with AI coding assistants via MCP or automate infrastructure tasks using LocalStack Skills.

Note

Enterprise K8 Deployment: LocalStack also supports execution within Kubernetes clusters via the Operator or Helm charts. This model enables dynamic scaling, environment isolation, and native orchestration. See our Kubernetes Deployment guide for more information.