President-elect Donald Trump has named Elon Musk as the leader of a new “Department of Government Efficiency,” that will “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” The Tesla CEO and owner of X will spearhead the effort along with former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump in a statement on Truth Social.

The scope of the role isn’t exactly clear. Trump’s press release said that “the Department of Government Efficiency will provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before.” It also stated that “their work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026.”

Musk shared the news on X, but didn’t indicate how the role might impact his obligations at his various other companies. Musk, who poured into Super Pac boosting Trump’s campaign, has previously about his desire to work with Trump to cut government spending. He did, however, joke about potential “merch” for the operation. “Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time,” Trump’s statement said.

Knowing how your cloud application will behave in production usually requires significant development and testing in the environment in which it will be deployed, be that AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or wherever. But this can be a resource-intensive endeavor, particularly with issues relating to latency (the time it takes to constantly send data) and the costs associated with this.

Swiss startup LocalStack has set out to address this by shifting the development process off the cloud and onto a developer’s local machine (i.e. their laptop), emulating the environment where it will go live. For now, its focus lies on AWS cloud apps, but the company is looking to ramp things up and go multi-cloud.

To back that strategy, the company on Tuesday said it has raised $25 million in a Series A round led by Notable Capital, one of the two entities that branched out of GGV Capital earlier this year.

For context, LocalStack started as an open source project while founder and co-CEO Waldemar Hummer (pictured above right, with co-founder Gerta Sheganaku, and Notable Capital managing partner Glenn Solomon) was at Atlassian in 2017. Initially, they were trying to help one of their Atlassian colleagues work while traveling into the office.

“We had a team member who was commuting on the train to work, and we wanted to get her productive even while being offline on the train,” Hummer told TechCrunch.

The idea germinated as a side project in the intervening years, with Hummer teaming up with Gerta Sheganaku, whom he’d known since his time at the University of Technology in Vienna in 2013, to drive early community adoption for the open source project. They launched as a full-time business in 2021, and after raising a small seed round, were later joined by a third co-founder, Thomas Rausch, who’s now head of engineering at the startup.

“What first got me excited about LocalStack was the increased adoption in the community, especially after LocalStack was publicly endorsed by Jeff Barr (AWS chief evangelist) — the GitHub Stars on the project saw a dramatic jump overnight and has been increasing ever since,” Sheganaku said. “By interacting with the community, we learned that some of the users were working in some of the largest companies of the world, trying to deploy LocalStack not only on their local machines, but also in their CI [continuous integration] pipelines.”

Today, the company counts some 900 paying users, including an impressive roster of self-serve customers including the likes of Apple, Comcast, IBM and Workday. LocalStack also works directly with some customers through an official procurement and onboarding process.

Going local

LocalStack’s offering consists of two core components: One is an emulator, which is basically a Docker image that the user downloads to their local machine with all the necessary AWS APIs. And the second part is a cloud platform, which serves access to additional features such as team collaboration, telemetry data, insights, and more.

The company has also retained some of its open source roots with a community version, making around one-third of its AWS services available through a public repository on GitHub. The additional two-thirds are held behind a private repository for paying customers. This community version serves as a useful tool for onboarding paying customers in the future, though that isn’t always the case.

“In many cases, community users sign up to LocalStack but do not become paying customers,” Sheganaku said. “We see many thousands of community users who have signed up for our web app, but not purchase any of the paid services.”

It’s worth noting that developers are already able to “mock out” certain parts of their infrastructure locally to run tests. There’s also popular frameworks like Testcontainers that can be used to simulate certain cloud services and infrastructure components on a local machine, though that usually has a different look, feel and “experience” to the actual cloud environment.

AWS itself also offers some tools to enable developers to emulate some of its services locally, such as AWS SAM, which supports the likes of AWS Lambda, DynamoDB and a few others. But LocalStack’s selling point is that it supports more than 100 core AWS services, including identity and access management (IAM) via Amazon Cognito, Amazon Kinesis data streams, and Amazon’s interactive query service Athena.

“LocalStack is almost like a drop-in replacement for AWS cloud,” Hummer said. “AWS SAM is really more specific to a certain set of services; LocalStack is much more comprehensive.”

LocalStack had hitherto raised an undisclosed $3 million in seed funding from CRV and Heavybit. Although it has operated largely under the radar, Hummer says it already has “substantial revenue numbers” and a global team of more than 50 operating mostly out of Europe. However, its customer base is substantively in the U.S., where it will now be looking to ramp things up in terms of product and go-to-market strategy — the fresh Series A round will help fund that effort.

For now, LocalStack’s core focus is AWS, though the company is also working on adding support for Snowflake, which is a different domain from that of AWS, but has similar challenges as it relates to cloud software development. Snowflake support remains in early-stage “preview” for now, but with the new $25 million in the bank, LocalStack is also gearing up to go multi-cloud, expanding support to Microsoft’s Azure, which Hummer said he hoped would be available some time in 2025.

“We’ve had a lot of requests for Azure,” Hummer said.

In addition to lead backer Notable Capital, LocalStack’s Series A round included participation from existing investors CRV and Heavybit.

The Monster Hunter franchise is bringing, well, monster hunting to your smartphone. Capcom has announced that it’s teaming up with TiMi — the studio behind games like Call of Duty: Mobile and Pokémon Unite — for a spinoff called Monster Hunter Outlanders. It’s described as an “open-world survival game” that’s playable either solo or co-op with up to four players. It sounds like Outlanders will feature the core aspects of a MonHun experience (namely, the exploring, hunting, and crafting) but with live service and social elements typical of a mobile game.

That recent success, combined with TiMi’s history and MonHun’s pedigree as a portable experience, are positive signs this could be more than a mobile cash grab. It might be some time before we get to check out the game for ourselves, however, as it doesn’t currently have a release date. Capcom says there will be “several play tests in advance” of the eventual launch.

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need clues.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Wordle hints and answers, Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too.

Update 11/12/24: Black Friday isn’t launching any time soon, but we’ve already found some HP laptop deals if you’re interested in buying a device by the popular brand. There’s a chance that these prices will go even lower during the shopping event, but these offers are pretty good if you need a new laptop right now.

With Black Friday deals officially set to start on November 29, you’ve still got some time to prepare for the discounts that the shopping event will bring. However, if you can’t wait until then to buy a new laptop, we highly recommend checking out the early Black Friday HP laptop deals that we’ve gathered here. No matter your budget or the type of laptop that you need, there’s surely something from these offers that will catch your attention.

We’ve also rounded up Black Friday gaming laptop deals if you want a machine primarily for playing video games, Black Friday Dell laptop deals for devices made by another trusted name, and Best Buy Black Friday laptop deals for offers from one of the largest retailers. In any case, you’re going to have to be quick with your purchase if you want to make sure that you’re able to take advantage of the savings, as there’s no guarantee on how long these prices will last.

HP Stream 14 — $199 $249 20% off

The HP Stream 14 is an affordable laptop that’s even cheaper right now following a 20% discount, for savings of $50. It’s perfect for basic functions with its Intel Celeron N4120 processor, Intel UHD Graphics 600, and 4GB of RAM. The device features a 14-inch screen with HD resolution, and while its 64GB eMMC provides limited storage, you can always save your files on cloud storage services or external hard drives.

HP Chromebook Plus x360 14 — $410 $640 35% off

The HP Chromebook Plus x360 14 elevates the Chromebook experience with its Intel Core i3 N305 processor, Intel UHD Graphics, 8GB of RAM, and a 128GB UFS for storage. The Chrome OS-powered device is also a 2-in-1 laptop, allowing you to transform it from laptop mode to tablet mode by folding its 14-inch touchscreen all the way back. It’s on sale at 35% off, for a $230 discount.

HP 255 G10 — $449 $599 25% off

The HP 255 G10 is pretty powerful for its price, which is even lower following a 25% discount for savings of $150. You’ll get the AMD Ryzen 3 7330U processor, integrated AMD graphics, and 16GB of RAM, alongside a 15.6-inch display and 1 TB SSD. The laptop also comes with Windows 11 Pro pre-installed, so you can access the operating system’s more advanced features.

HP Spectre x360 14 — $1,400 $1,900 26% off

The HP Spectre x360 14 is a 2-in-1 laptop that features a 14-inch OLED touchscreen with 2.8K resolution, for impressive visuals whether you’re using it in laptop mode or tablet mode. In terms of performance, it’s pretty fast with the Intel Core Ultra 7 processor, Intel Arc Graphics, and 32GB of RAM. It’s also got a massive 2TB for storage. The laptop will be yours with a 26% discount, or savings of $500.

HP Omen Transcend 16 — $1,600 $2,100 23% off

For a gaming laptop that will be ready for upcoming PC games, go for the HP Omen Transcend 16. It’s equipped with the 14th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card, and 32GB of RAM, and you’ve got plenty of storage space to install games on its 1TB SSD. The gaming laptop also features a 16-inch WQXGA screen, and it’s on sale with a 23% discount that’s equivalent to $500 in savings.

How to choose an HP laptop on Black Friday

HP is one of the best laptop brands, earning a reputation for reliability over recent years. That means you’ll be fine with any HP laptop, but to narrow down your choices on what to buy, you’re going to have to start by determining how much you’re willing to spend. Set a maximum budget and select among the Black Friday HP laptop deals that match — it’s important not to go overboard if you want to have enough cash to take advantage of other offers during the shopping event.

Our laptop buying guide highlights the specifications that you should be looking for, starting with the processor — it’s AMD versus Intel, and you’re fine with either as long as you get the most powerful one that you can afford. Our guide on how much RAM do you need provides an in-depth explanation, but we highly recommend getting at least 8GB of RAM to breeze through basic tasks and at least 16GB of RAM if you’re planning to use more demanding apps or play PC games. Screen size is also important — it goes as small as 13 inches for portability, and as big as 18 inches for a better look at your projects and streaming shows.

How we chose these HP laptop Black Friday deals