[robshippr]

The real issue with LocalStack was always drift. Tests pass locally, then something breaks in staging because the S3 response format is slightly different or DynamoDB throttling doesn't match. After getting burned enough times we just switched to short-lived real AWS environments for integration tests. More expensive, but way fewer surprises in prod.

[chii]

i would imagine localstack is a sniff-test - aka, if it doesn't pass localstack, you don't run the more expensive real AWS integration test. In other words, like food, you don't eat the cost unless it passes the sniff test.