PyCon APAC 2023

Develop your Python cloud & serverless apps locally with LocalStack!
2023-10-27 , track 2

In this session, we provide a hands-on introduction to LocalStack, a fully functional local AWS cloud stack. With LocalStack, Python-based cloud applications and infrastructure can be developed entirely on your local machine, reducing dev&test cycles from minutes to seconds.


DevOps teams across the globe are increasingly focusing time and energy on optimizing their cloud development and deployment flows. The traditional deploy-and-test cycles against public clouds can become slow and tedious, where developers are often facing several minutes of idle times between deployments that need to be frequently triggered during testing & debugging.

Also, with the increasing popularity of Infrastructure-as-Code tools like Terraform or Pulumi, efficient testing of automated infrastructure deployments becomes critical. Testing cycles for deployments of complex stacks with large-scale resources can easily take 15+ minutes or more in the real cloud.

In this talk, we will provide a detailed deep dive into LocalStack, an open-source cloud emulator that allows you to develop Python cloud & serverless applications entirely on your local machine without ever having to connect to the real cloud! LocalStack provides 70+ AWS services running in a Docker container completely on your local machine. We will develop AWS applications, but since LocalStack runs entirely on the local machine without talking to the real cloud, no cloud access credentials are required to follow the talk.

The talk is roughly structured as follows:

  • Intro to AWS cloud development with Python
  • Getting started with LocalStack
  • Developing Python serverless apps with LocalStack
  • Advanced integrations for Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, CDK) and CI/CD (Github Actions)
  • Python internals of LocalStack
  • Summary and Q&A

The session covers interactive live coding to showcase common scenarios and use cases, different settings for local debugging of Lambdas and containerized apps as well as some advanced new features that can radically improve productivity and team collaboration patterns.

Harsh is an engineer at LocalStack working at improving the developer experience of engineers developing/testing cloud applications on AWS. He is also an AWS Community Builder in the Serverless category and has previously worked at Red Hat, HackerRank, and Quansight! He is deeply passionate about cloud & serverless development, including DevOps, practises, Web engineering, and using technology to mitigate climate change.