Swiss developer tooling provider LocalStack GmbH today announced that it has closed a $25 million early-stage funding round. 

Notable Capital led the Series A investment. It was joined by CRV and Heavybit, which previously backed a $3.2 million seed round for LocalStack in 2021. 

LocalStack provides an open-source tool that allows developers to emulate an Amazon Web Services environment on their local machines. The software can mimic dozens of AWS services, as well as features such as the cloud giant’s account management controls. LocalStack generates revenue by selling paid versions that include capabilities not available in the open-source edition.

One of the main use cases for the company’s platform is testing cloud applications. Before developers deploy an update to a production workload, they have to check it for errors. Doing so on a local computer with LocalStack can be more cost-efficient than using an AWS environment, where new instances may have to be rented to facilitate testing.

“Enterprises today face mounting pressure to innovate rapidly while controlling costs and maintaining product reliability,” co-founders Gerta Sheganaku and Waldemar Hummer wrote in a blog post today. “LocalStack addresses these challenges.”

LocalStack users can test not only applications but also infrastructure configurations. Software teams often leverage automation tools such as Terraform to set up AWS environments. Using LocalStack, a company can ensure that its Terraform configuration scripts work as intended.

The top-end enterprise version of the platform includes so-called chaos engineering features. They enable developers to test an application’s reliability by simulating technical hiccups. A retailer, for example, could assess how well its online store’s backend manages sudden traffic spikes. 

Uploading business records to the cloud is another task that LocalStack promises to ease. Its platform can emulate, among others, the AWS Database Migration Service for moving databases to the Amazon Inc. unit’s cloud. A company could use LocalStack to test whether the manner in which it plans to move a workload will meet project requirements.  

LocalStack says its platform also provides several other benefits. In cloud-based testing environments, administrators must create an account for each developer who requires access and configure access rules. LocalStack removes that requirement. Additionally, the fact that the software runs on developers’ local machines prevents application errors from cascading to a company’s production AWS environment.

Thousands of developers at Apple Inc., IBM Inc., Workday Inc. and other companies use the platform, according to the company, and it has more than 900 paying customers. 

LocalStack will invest the proceeds from its funding round in feature development. It recently introduced a version of its platform that is optimized for Snowflake projects and is also working on an Azure edition. Additionally, it plans to increase the number of cloud testing use cases that its platform supports. 

“A big focus of our work is to enable use cases that are hard or impossible to achieve in the real cloud — for example, snapshotting and restoring the full state of a cloud app, or inspecting the messages of an event-based application and re-playing individual events for debugging,” Sheganaku and Hummer detailed.

Image: LocalStack