Integration testing is complicated as it is, even more so when third-party services are involved, but cloud-native AWS applications that rely on managed services are especially tough to test.

Cloud integration tests are particularly challenging due to the high complexity of the interconnected services, dependency management, deployment and provisioning intricacies, and potentially high costs. So how can we bring the ease and speed of unit tests into these integration tests? Ideally, we’d like to use a local setup where we can quickly spin up and deploy our services in an emulated environment that’s as close as possible to the real deal. By simulating real-world scenarios and testing the integration of various parts of the system, these tests help us identify and resolve issues early in the development process. This is where Testcontainers and LocalStack work beautifully together to bring you the best of integration tests and cloud services on your machine. We’ll explore how we can enhance the testability of a Spring Boot application that relies on AWS services and vastly increase the test coverage of our applications without any need for mocking or remote AWS sandbox accounts.

Testing your AWS-powered Spring Boot app with LocalStack and Testcontainers conveys isolation, speed, cost, and flexibility, making it effortless to get started with writing integration tests for your cloud application.