Swapnil Bhartiya: You folks have good adoption, good traction recently. Talk a bit about what is driving it.

Waldemar Hummer: Yeah, so I think one of the driving forces, by the way, recently hit I think 400 million Docker pools. I think something 65,000 GitHub stars. So some really impressive numbers. I think a lot of it is the love from the community that we get. People really love the fact that they can use this tool very easily on the local machines and their laptops. So in general, this bottom up motion of adoption has helped us tremendously make the product really widely known, widely adopted, and now increasingly also targeting the enterprise buyer Personas. But we’re very much deeply rooted in the developer community with our product.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you talk about what does your product portfolio look like? Is there a Community edition? Is there an Enterprise Edition? Talk about that.

Waldemar Hummer: The main like everything builds on top of our cloud emulators. So, so the emulators currently are AWS and Snowflake and we’re pushing out Azure in the next couple of months. And the emulators really provide the baseline for local execution of your testing and development. On top of the emulators we’re building what we call Developer Experience features, Devex features. So we have one feature, for example, that we call App Inspector. It allows you to do deep inspection of your serverless application. You can get insights around what is the topology of my app, you can look at the events, you can look at event payloads and so on and really give you much more deep capabilities for debugging and development. Another feature we recently put out is what we call chaos engineering. Chaos Engineering allows you to inject errors or latencies into the APIs to test your applications for resiliency. So what happens if US East 1 goes down? What happens if my database is at capacity and we can simulate these situations in in local stack and make sure that your application is resilient to these kind of faults. Because things do happen in the cloud, right? So it’s not happening very frequently, but just a couple Months ago US East 1 was going down and it’s good to be prepared for these kind of error scenarios beforehand.

Swapnil Bhartiya: So if developers or enterprises look at

Waldemar Hummer: local stock,

Swapnil Bhartiya: what are they looking at? Because you know, it’s like the whole local, whatever development is going back to local development once again. So how should they look at you? And if you can point out some of your competitors and what edge you have over those competitors, I’ll start with maybe.

Waldemar Hummer: The key value proposition is basically three pillars. It’s efficiency, cost savings and quality efficiency. Just from the feedback loop and just time savings, like many hours spent in developer week. So that’s the key pillar. The second one is around cost savings because you’re not, I think there’s an estimate that a third like 30% of all cloud resources are just wasted and not really being used. Somebody forgets to shut down a cluster over the weekend or something like that. And the third pillar is around quality because you shift left your testing and therefore you just by tendency increase the quality of the application. So those are the three main pillars of our value proposition when it comes to the competitive landscape. There is, it’s interesting, there’s not that many direct competitors out there right now that are doing exactly what we’re doing in terms of the local cloud development experience. But there’s a few tools in the observability space, for example, like serverless observability, giving you insights into your application. Or there’s another set of platforms, for example Serverless Stack SST is one of them that give you a so called remote experience. So you have the local look and feel, but it actually executes your workloads in the remote environment. But what we do is pretty unique because we give you this fully localized environment that you can take with you in your CI CD pipelines, in your local machine or anywhere we can run these workloads.

Swapnil Bhartiya: And also reading that you folks also have Community Edition, but you’re merging into kind of enterprise or single image. Can you talk about what is your strategy there?

Waldemar Hummer: That’s right. So we recently made a change in our community offering to combine the images into one. We want to provide a more unified developer experience and user experience because we saw that there was a bit of a fragmentation between the OSS version and our advanced offerings. The main change from a user perspective is that we asked for sign up. So previously you just downloaded the image and nowadays you also ask to scrape, give us your email address, sign up for an account and then you can leverage the full power of the local stack cloud platform also that we offer with our web application with some of these devex features that I mentioned before. So that’s kind of the direction we’re going into now. And that allows us to also interact a bit more directly with our customers users and also, you know, optimize the product experience over time much more directly.

Swapnil Bhartiya: If I ask you in general when, I mean you have been in space for long, company maybe 40, but you have been in space for long. When you look at whole local cloud development, when you look at the emergence of agentic AI, when you look at because of geopolitical crisis, more sovereign cloud, sovereign AI. Where do you think we are heading? What does the future look like for developers?

Waldemar Hummer: Yeah, I think it’s very interesting observations. First of all, there’s a certain tendency towards like again, decentralization. You know, it’s kind of the bent, the pendulum is swinging a bit back and forth. If you look at the early days in 70s, 80s, it was mainframe and then the web came about, which was decentralization. Cloud is another centralization. Now I think we see another wave starting of more decentralization, pushing things more to the edge and to end devices. I think the other acceleration we see is of course with agent AI, right? So I think the world that we see today, if you look at one, two or three years into the future, it’s going to look probably quite different from how we develop software today. So code is being generated much more quickly. So the pace of acceleration is actually quite remarkable with some of these models that are out there, which again means, you know, a lot of people are talking about AI slop and code that’s being generated that’s maybe not trustworthy, which is even more critical to, you know, have strong quality gates, make sure that we test very sort of diligently all the code that’s being generated. And I think this will have a big influence on software engineering as a whole in the next couple of years.