Anca Ghenade
I have been immersing myself in the realm of Java since my university days, focusing primarily on developing enterprise applications over the past seven years. Recently, I have embraced the exciting and challenging field of cloud development, captivated by its immense potential. I now enjoy sharing my learning experiences through engaging demos that bring tangible value to others. I also appreciate the meaningful conversations and feedback related to user experience and use cases, as they enable me to contribute towards the product development efforts of my team at LocalStack.
Sessions
Let’s tackle some of the common challenges faced by users working with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in cloud environments. We can start by looking at the difficulties everyone encounters, such as managing the complex and constantly changing services, integrating IaC with existing systems, and ensuring everything stays secure and within budget.
For beginners, the journey is even tougher. They have to learn IaC basics, get skilled with tools like AWS CloudFormation, Terraform, Pulumi, or CDK, and understand how to apply best practices in their work. This includes figuring out how to spot and fix problems in their IaC scripts and how to shift existing setups to IaC.
A big part of our focus is on the importance of testing. Making sure that the infrastructure works well with every new update and passes all the tests in CI pipelines is crucial. This brings us to the question, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a tool that makes all this easier?”
This is where LocalStack, an open-source tool designed to address these very challenges, comes in. LocalStack lets users emulate specific cloud services in a container, providing a safe space to test and try out new things. We'll discuss how it works with different IaC tools and pinpoint the advantages of such a practice.
We’ll wrap up with a demo showing how to use LocalStack to deploy a project both on a real cloud provider, AWS, and locally, highlighting how LocalStack simplifies the IaC feedback loops, making it easier, more secure, and cost-effective.
Cloud integration tests are particularly challenging due to the high complexity of the interconnected services, dependency management, deployment and provisioning intricacies, and potentially high costs. So how can we bring the ease and speed of unit tests into these integration tests? Ideally, we’d like to use a local setup where we can quickly spin up and deploy our services in an emulated environment that’s as close as possible to the real deal. By simulating real-world scenarios and testing the integration of various parts of the system, these tests help us identify and resolve issues early in the development process. This is where Testcontainers and LocalStack work beautifully together to bring you the best of integration tests and cloud services on your machine. We’ll explore how we can enhance the testability of our applications that rely on AWS services and vastly increase the test coverage of our applications without any need for mocking or remote cloud sandbox accounts.