October 2026 Summaries

LocalStack for Azure has launched in free public preview as a local sandbox for building, testing, and validating Azure applications without deploying to live Azure resources. It aims to reduce delays, access dependencies, shared-environment conflicts, and non-production cloud costs by giving each developer or AI agent an isolated environment that supports repeated testing without Azure credentials or resource consumption. The emulator supports selected enterprise-focused services, including AKS, Azure Container Apps, Azure Functions, Web Apps, Storage Accounts, Cosmos DB, Key Vault, Managed Identity, Private Endpoint functionality where applicable, and ARM, Bicep, and Terraform infrastructure deployments. LocalStack emphasizes that it does not provide complete Azure parity or replace Azure itself, and its supported-services documentation identifies limitations and workarounds. Preview access is expected to remain free until general availability, currently anticipated in early 2027, while advanced features such as App Inspector, snapshots, and chaos or resiliency APIs are not included initially. Users can sign up, use existing LocalStack accounts, follow the setup documentation, and provide feedback through the project’s GitHub discussions to help shape the general-availability release.

AWS Amplify Gen 2 enables developers to define application backends in TypeScript and deploy services such as Cognito, AppSync, DynamoDB, Lambda, and S3 through the ampx CLI, but its normal sandbox workflow requires access to a real AWS account and creates CloudFormation stacks for each developer. The tutorial shows how LocalStack can emulate the necessary AWS services locally, allowing a React todo application to use an Amplify Gen 2 backend without affecting cloud infrastructure or requiring AWS credentials for every contributor. It explains how to configure a LocalStack AWS profile, bootstrap CDK, set endpoint and CORS options, deploy the backend with ampx sandbox, and connect the frontend through generated amplify_outputs.json settings, with an additional Cognito endpoint override for local use. The sample uses a Cognito identity pool to grant guest access and signs AppSync GraphQL requests with temporary AWS credentials, while Amplify generates the Todo API, DynamoDB table, and related CloudFormation stacks. Users can inspect deployed resources, table data, API calls, and logs using the LocalStack CLI or web interface, then run the sandbox in watch mode to update the data schema, such as adding an isDone field, through Amplify’s hotswap deployment process. The workflow concludes by deleting the sandbox stack and stopping LocalStack, demonstrating a local development loop that closely mirrors Amplify deployments on AWS.

LocalStack for AWS 2026.09.0 introduces S3 Files, an Ultimate-plan feature that mounts versioned S3 bucket data as synchronized file systems for Lambda, ECS, and Batch workloads, while making the new DynamoDB and Kinesis engines the default with shard-aware stream polling, state migration, and broader backup support. The release adds Timestream scheduled queries, expanded AppSync GraphQL and Events authorization, subscription, resolver, schema, and error-handling compatibility, plus CloudWatch Logs Insights queries, destination forwarding, and KMS validation. CloudFormation gains in-place updates for 63 resource types, initial support for several AppSync, API Gateway, and SES resources, improved replacement detection, and numerous service-specific deployment fixes. Other updates improve ECS, Batch, Step Functions, Lambda, Glue, diagnostics, IAM and KMS enforcement, RDS and analytics services, networking, messaging, CloudFront, Route 53, S3, EventBridge, and other AWS emulations. The legacy ELBv2 provider has been removed, older DynamoDB and Kinesis engines are deprecated, and ORAS Cloud Pod remotes are discontinued; users can upgrade through the lstk command or by pulling the 2026.09.0 Docker image.