> 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 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.
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.
Ilove the emulation, but it will never come from the hyper scalers.
One issue is that local emulation runs into some big political rocks as soon as it gets good. To start with, the emulator is good enough and covers a tiny surface of what people want, eg k8s and s3. Resistance here is about customers experiencing issues caused by gaps in fidelity vs the real environment and subsequent pain for the emulator product team. ok, fine.
But then you get customers who take your emulator and use it in places where AWS cant go, eg, airgapped environments. They start asking for more serious features. But wait! another team in the hyperscaler was already trying to solve this, for far more than zero dollars. Azure Stack. Azure Local. AWS Snowball. Now there are VPs shooting at you because you are, in their view, cannibalizing their revenue.
You might try to avoid this war by emphasizing the dev sandbox aspect, selling to developers only and making sure that you only talk about APIs and stuff. Problem is, the API surface is 90% of why the cloud is useful (the other ten percent being the assertion that you don't have to think about it, which is an increasingly untrue proposition, as the reams of SREs will tell you). So now you have an emulator for the most valuable part of Cloud, in the hands of people who know how to use it and are strongly incentivized and capable of making it better, all running locally. It's a very small step to making that commercial and wiping huge chunks of revenue out, as your VP will tell you as they sign your pink slip.
Talking to devs, the most common thing I hear re emulation is a desire to be able to let rip on any service and not fear a giant bill. Since all clouds have budget tools I wonder why this isnt possible today? Maybe theres a weakness in the planning tools rather thanthe post-use budgeting ones?
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
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.
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?
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.
At that speed you can treat it as disposable: fresh instance per test run, no shared state, no flaky tests from leftover S3 objects. that was never practical with LocalStack cold start
Local AWS emulators are one of those tools where the value is inversely proportional to how much you trust your staging environment. If your staging account perfectly mirrors prod, you don't need a local emulator. But nobody's staging perfectly mirrors prod, so you end up needing something like this for the fast feedback loop on IAM policies, Step Functions state machines, and anything involving SQS/SNS fanout where the iteration cycle against real AWS is measured in minutes per attempt. The question is always parity — how closely does the emulation match real AWS behavior at the edges? LocalStack has been chasing that for years and still hits gaps. Curious how Floci handles the services where AWS's own behavior is underdocumented.
Looking at the features this seems to be an awesome project, but the commit history (even on the develop branch) shows almost nothing.
No pull-requests, no real issues, it smells like it was auto-generated which is disappointing. Makes it harder to trust if you're going to test with "real data", how do we know it won't be sent elsewhere?
If you want to use that for unit testing, then I think it would be better to mock the calls to AWS services. That way you test only your implementation, in an environment you control.
If you want to use that for local development, then I think it would be better to provision a test environment (using Terraform or any other IaC tool). That way you don't run the risk of a bug slipping into prod because the emulator has a different behaviour than the real service.
IDK, I never fancied using local emulators for stuff like the cloud, as others have pointed out, for UT you can mock cloud services, and for localdevelopment you should intercat with the cloud.
Hiding bad system design behind another docker container will not push you to the right direction, but the opposite.
In addition this is def vide-coded (50k loc in one week) so I don't see how can one trust this even.
How's this compare to moto? I understand folks are upset about licensing changes for LocalStack (which I happily use at my day job with an enterprise license), but there are already several good alternatives.
The aws endpoint coverage is impressive for moto [1], which my team almost migrated to, but we liked our support contract with LocalStack.
32 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 53.9 ms ] threadI 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.
One issue is that local emulation runs into some big political rocks as soon as it gets good. To start with, the emulator is good enough and covers a tiny surface of what people want, eg k8s and s3. Resistance here is about customers experiencing issues caused by gaps in fidelity vs the real environment and subsequent pain for the emulator product team. ok, fine.
But then you get customers who take your emulator and use it in places where AWS cant go, eg, airgapped environments. They start asking for more serious features. But wait! another team in the hyperscaler was already trying to solve this, for far more than zero dollars. Azure Stack. Azure Local. AWS Snowball. Now there are VPs shooting at you because you are, in their view, cannibalizing their revenue.
You might try to avoid this war by emphasizing the dev sandbox aspect, selling to developers only and making sure that you only talk about APIs and stuff. Problem is, the API surface is 90% of why the cloud is useful (the other ten percent being the assertion that you don't have to think about it, which is an increasingly untrue proposition, as the reams of SREs will tell you). So now you have an emulator for the most valuable part of Cloud, in the hands of people who know how to use it and are strongly incentivized and capable of making it better, all running locally. It's a very small step to making that commercial and wiping huge chunks of revenue out, as your VP will tell you as they sign your pink slip.
Talking to devs, the most common thing I hear re emulation is a desire to be able to let rip on any service and not fear a giant bill. Since all clouds have budget tools I wonder why this isnt possible today? Maybe theres a weakness in the planning tools rather thanthe post-use budgeting ones?
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
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.
- 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.
At that speed you can treat it as disposable: fresh instance per test run, no shared state, no flaky tests from leftover S3 objects. that was never practical with LocalStack cold start
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420619
https://github.com/robotocore/robotocore
No pull-requests, no real issues, it smells like it was auto-generated which is disappointing. Makes it harder to trust if you're going to test with "real data", how do we know it won't be sent elsewhere?
If you want to use that for unit testing, then I think it would be better to mock the calls to AWS services. That way you test only your implementation, in an environment you control.
If you want to use that for local development, then I think it would be better to provision a test environment (using Terraform or any other IaC tool). That way you don't run the risk of a bug slipping into prod because the emulator has a different behaviour than the real service.
Hiding bad system design behind another docker container will not push you to the right direction, but the opposite.
In addition this is def vide-coded (50k loc in one week) so I don't see how can one trust this even.
The aws endpoint coverage is impressive for moto [1], which my team almost migrated to, but we liked our support contract with LocalStack.
http://docs.getmoto.org/en/latest/docs/services/index.html