Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

A few notes about "local AWS" (or "local cloud") based on other comments and my own XP:

- I'm not sure this kind of product is really a foot in the door to create new customers. Someone not willing to create an actual account because they have no money or they just don't want to put their card details is not someone who's going to become a 6 figures per year customer, which is the level to be noticed by those providers.

- The free tier of AWS is actually quite generous. For my own needs I spend less than $10/year total spread around dozens of accounts.

- If one wants to learn AWS, they MUST learn that there are no hard spend limits, and the only way to actually learn it, is to be bitten by it as early as possible. It's better to overspend $5 at the beginning of the journey than to overspend $5k when going to prod.

- The main interest of local cloud is actually to make things easier and iterating faster, because you don't focus on all the security layer. Since everything is local, focus on using the services, period. Meanwhile, if you wanted to rely on actual dev accounts, you need to first make sure that everything is secure. With local cloud you can skip all this. But then, if you decide to go live, you have to fix this security debt and it most often than not break things that "work on my computer".

- Localstack has the actual support of AWS, that's why they have so much features and are able to follow the releases of the services. I doubt this FOSS alternative will have it.

Cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure should offer local emulators for development. This would encourage developers to utilize their services more.

I currently work with several AWS serverless stacks that are challenging or even impossible to integration test locally. While Localstack provide a decent solution, it seems like a service that AWS should offer to enhance the developer experience. They’d also be in the best position to keep it current.

This project would be comical if it takes off. In Romanian this name means "a small pile of hair", but informally it's only used as a synonym for pubic hair.

> LocalStack's community edition sunset in March 2026 — requiring auth tokens, dropping CI support, and freezing security updates. Floci is the no-strings-attached alternative.

This is exactly what I was waiting for.

Although I love localstack and am grateful for what they have done, I always thought that an open community-driven solution would be much more suitable and opens a lot of doors for AWS engineers to contribute back. I’m certain that it’s on their best interest to do so (specially as many of their popular products have local versions)

It’s a no-brainer to me as AI adoption continues to increase: local-first integration testing is a must and teams that are equipped to do so will be ahead of everyone else

I run several Docker services on EC2 and testing locally before deploying has always been painful. This looks promising for catching config issues before they hit production. Does it support EC2 + RDS together in local mode?

Cool, I've tried localstack before and cant wait to give it a try

Anyway, do anyone know if there're similar stuff but for gcp? So far https://github.com/goccy/bigquery-emulator helped me a lot in emulating bigquery behaviour, but I cant find emulator for the whole gcp environment.

is all of this is vibe coded?

I really need to find a way to have appsync local

Is Eucalyptus still a thing?

If I wanted to follow a tutorial or book but could not afford AWS, could this tool be used as a substitute for AWS functionality?

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