- How to use containers to add additional troubleshooting and debugging tools to your development environment

## Who's this for?

- Teams that want to reduce the coupling they have on shared or deployed infrastructure or remote API endpoints
- Teams that want to reduce the complexity and costs associated with using cloud services directly during development
- Developers that want to make it easier to visualize what's going on in their databases, queues, etc.
- Teams that want to reduce the complexity of setting up their development environment without impacting the development of the app itself


## Tools integration

Works well with Docker Compose and Testcontainers.

## Modules

### What is container-supported development?

Container-supported development is the idea of using containers to enhance your development environment by running local instances or emulators of the services your application relies on. Once you're using containers, it's easy to add additional services to visualize or troubleshoot what's going on in your services.

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### Demo: running databases locally

With container-supported development, it's easy to run databases locally. In this demo, you'll see how to do so, as well as how to connect a non-containerized application to the database.

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> Learn more about running databases in containers in the [Use containerized databases](/guides/databases.md) guide.

### Demo: mocking API endpoints

Many APIs require data from other data endpoints. In development, this adds complexities such as the sharing of credentials, uptime/availability, and rate limiting. Instead of relying on those services directly, your application can interact with a mock API server.

This demo will demonstrate how using WireMock can make it easy to develop and test an application, including the APIs various error states.

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> Learn more about using WireMock to mock API in the [Mocking API services with WireMock](/guides/wiremock.md) guide.

### Demo: developing the cloud locally

When developing apps, it's often easier to outsource aspects of the application to cloud services, such as Amazon S3. However, connecting to those services in local development introduces IAM policies, networking constraints, and provisioning complications. While these requirements are important in a production setting, they complicate development environments significantly. 

With container-supported development, you can run local instances of these services during development and testing, removing the need for complex setups. In this demo, you'll see how LocalStack makes it easy to develop and test applications entirely from the developer's workstation.

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> [!TIP]
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> Learn more about using LocalStack in the [Develop and test AWS Cloud applications using LocalStack](/guides/localstack.md) guide.

### Demo: adding additional debug and troubleshooting tools

Once you start using containers in your development environment, it becomes much easier to add additional containers to visualize the contents of the databases or message queues, seed document stores, or event publishers. In this demo, you'll see a few of these examples, as well as how you can connect multiple containers together to make testing even easier.

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