At that speed you can treat it as disposable: fresh instance per test run, no shared state, no flaky tests from leftover S3 objects. that was never practical with LocalStack cold start
This is why I use LocalStack today. I can stand up all my infra for my teams 14 microservices in under 30s and test my in flight changes, all without an internet connection. Deploying to our real staging environments take 30m (literally) for a single CDK / cloudformation stack change. The fact I have an immediate feedback loop saves my team inordinate amounts of time. Cloudformation deployments are criminally slow.
I recently discussed this with an adjacent org that didn't use a local environment at all outside of junit mocks for unit testing, and their deployment pipelines take over 45m per commit. Ridiculous.
Side note: this local-first strategy works well but requires some beefy hardware with gobs of ram, at least in my line of work with java and rails microservices. My laptop is an M4 with 64gb ram. I honestly wish I had the 128GB model...
At that speed you can treat it as disposable: fresh instance per test run, no shared state, no flaky tests from leftover S3 objects. that was never practical with LocalStack cold start