LocalStack announced the public preview of LocalStack for Azure on October 7, 2026, offering self-serve access at no charge during the preview. The emulator is designed for local development and testing, not as a production replacement for Azure. Its most important boundary for developers: creating or accepting a setting locally does not mean the emulator enforces it. (LocalStack announcement)
Which Azure workflows fit the preview?
LocalStack lists ARM and Bicep templates, Terraform modules, Pulumi programs, Azure CLI scripts, and Azure Developer CLI workflows. Its preview services include examples such as AKS, Container Apps, Functions, App Service, Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, PostgreSQL, Storage, Service Bus, Key Vault, and Virtual Network. (LocalStack product page)
That gives teams a way to exercise familiar infrastructure-as-code workflows against selected local Azure service implementations. The listed tools and services do not mean every operation behaves as it does in Azure; the relevant check is what each service actually implements.
App Service settings can be saved without being enforced
LocalStack’s App Service emulator stores and returns access restrictions, authentication settings, publishing credential policies, and the httpsOnly setting, but does not enforce them. Requests are allowed, and the app is served over HTTP. A successful local request therefore cannot establish that those access controls or HTTPS behavior work as intended in Azure. (LocalStack App Services documentation)
The emulator also supports a basic staging-slot workflow: teams can deploy to separate slots and swap a slot into production. Traffic routing, swap-with-preview, and auto-swap are not implemented. App Service state is held in memory and is lost when the emulator stops, so the app’s code and containers do not return with restored app records. (LocalStack App Services documentation)
Storage checks vary by authentication method
LocalStack documents validation for Shared Key signatures and SAS tokens. Its Storage Account emulator checks SAS signatures, validity windows, source IP, protocol, service, resource type, and permissions. That makes these specific checks distinct from bearer-token authorization: unless RBAC enforcement is enabled, the emulator checks that a bearer token is present rather than enforcing its permissions. User-delegation SAS requests also do not re-check the requesting principal’s RBAC authorization. (LocalStack Storage Account documentation)
Some protocol behavior differs too. LocalStack says an anonymous request without x-ms-version can receive a 401 response when Azure returns 409 if public access is disallowed. A test that depends on that response should account for the difference.
Virtual Network does not simulate network enforcement
The Virtual Network emulator stores and returns resource metadata, but it does not route network traffic or enforce security rules. That means a local test cannot establish whether traffic will follow a route or be blocked by a network rule in Azure. Virtual Network resources are also not persisted when the emulator stops or restarts. (LocalStack Virtual Network documentation)
What the Apple Silicon caveat applies to
The architecture limitation concerns Oryx-based App Service code deployment. LocalStack’s Oryx build and runtime images are for amd64. For Apple Silicon, LocalStack documents using Rosetta with Apple’s Virtualization framework for amd64 emulation; builds under QEMU can crash. Custom container images that have an ARM64 variant are unaffected by this Oryx limitation. (LocalStack App Services documentation)
LocalStack forecasts general availability for early 2027 and says it will announce GA pricing then. The forecast is not a fixed release date. (LocalStack product page)
