I’ve been adjacent to cloud infrastructure for years, spinning up environments for C-Trax in AWS, learning config management at Chef. But this week at LocalStack felt like the first time I got to really build in the cloud.

Not hypothetically. Not on paper. Actually deploying services, wiring them together, and watching something come to life.

The best part? It all runs locally, so I can break things safely and often.

🧪 The Project: Meme Game, but Make It Serverless

I’m in the middle of building a meme caption game powered by:

  • API Gateway to expose endpoints
  • Lambda for scoring and logic
  • DynamoDB to store game data
  • S3 for static assets
  • Terraform to define it all as code

It’s part demo, part sandbox, and 100% the kind of thing I wanted to do with C-Trax, but couldn’t justify the risk back then. Serverless infra felt too new, too unpredictable. But with LocalStack, I can finally dive in without fear of blowing up a production app or the cloud bill.

🛠 Terraform: The Tool I Always Wanted to Learn

I first heard about Terraform while working at Chef. It sounded powerful, declarative, and honestly kind of beautiful, but I never had a good excuse to get hands-on.

That excuse finally arrived.

I’m using Terraform to define and deploy all the pieces of the meme game. And while the syntax threw me at first (and I definitely cursed at a few provider blocks), the “infra as code” lightbulb finally clicked.

⚠️ What Tripped Me Up (In a Good Way)

  1. Terraform + LocalStack Integration

    Figuring out the right provider config to talk to LocalStack took some trial and error. But once it worked, it was chef’s kiss.

  2. Lambda Gotchas

    Even locally, Lambdas come with quirks like cold starts and subtle packaging issues. Watching logs in real time helped me debug faster than I ever could in AWS.

  3. Endpoint Confusion

    I kept forgetting I wasn’t on “real” AWS. LocalStack has its own endpoints and quirks. But once I got the hang of it, I stopped worrying about credentials or billing.

💡 Why This Week Mattered

This wasn’t just “set up a demo app.” It was confidence building. I’ve been around cloud talk for years, but now I’m in it. Writing infra code, testing services, and learning to break and fix things as I go.

With LocalStack, the cloud feels less like a fortress and more like a workshop. I get to play, test ideas, and actually see what’s happening under the hood.

🔮 Up Next

I’m still wrapping up the meme game and will share the repo once it’s ready. Next week, I plan to experiment with chaos engineering. Like simulating a broken DynamoDB and seeing how the app holds up.

If you’ve built something like this, or have tips for a serverless noob, I’d love to hear from you! You can find me on the interwebs on LinkedIn and Twitter (never calling it X).

Thanks for following along! Stay tuned for next week’s adventure in the cloud ☁️