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Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

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Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#51

Post by cosmotic »

thezenmonsta wrote: post #50

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…

Relying on staging means no offline development and also leads to toe-stepping. Cheap local implementations are great for consistent tests.

Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#52

Post by rienbdj »

thezenmonsta wrote: post #50

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…

Ultimately you need staging, yes.

But you can’t have every dev tweaking staging at the same time as they work. How can you debug things when the ground is shifting beneath you?

Ideally every dev has their own AWS account to play with, but that can be cost prohibitive.

A good middle ground is where 95% of work is done locally using emulators and staging is used for the remaining 5%.

One of the first things I do when building a new component is create a docker compose environment for it.

Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#53

Post by hnlmorg »

thezenmonsta wrote: post #50

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 point of tools like this is for development, not staging. By “development” I don’t just mean developers writing code, but any unit tests that require behavioural testing that cannot easily be mocked too.

So by the time you’re ready to push to staging you should be past the point of wanting to emulate AWS and instead pushing to UAT/test/staging (whatever your naming convention) AWS accounts.

Ideally you would have multiple non-production environments in AWS and if your teams are well staffed then your dedicated Cloud Platform / DevOps team should be locking these non-prod environments from developers in the same way as they do to production too.

Bonus points if you can spin up ephemeral environments automatically for feature branches via CI/CD. But that’s often impractical / not pragmatic for your average cloud-based project.

Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#54

Post by cyberax »

wiether wrote: post #43
cyberax wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main use case for local emulators is unit testing. Maybe even some integration testing, especially for stuff like VPC setup that often can't be done without global side effects. Security for dev accounts is not a big deal, just give each developer an individual account and set up billing alerts.

> Security for dev accounts is not a big deal, just give each developer an individual account and set up billing alerts. If your only focus is spending, yes. Otherwise, a "not a big deal" dev account can quickly become the door to your whole org for hackers

It really depends on the way you set it up and use it. Raw EC2 instances are obviously the most dangerous items.

RDS databases, DynamoDB, and S3? Much less so.

Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#55

Post by jeroenhd »

mdavid626 wrote: post #48

I’d be happier if this could run as one binary without Docker. Java is so much harder to setup.

Getting Java to run is a base requirement for running most software written in Java.

However, there is a dedicated Dockerfile for creating a native image (Java words for "binary") that shouldn't require a JVM. I haven't tested running the binary myself so it's possible there are dependencies I'm not aware of, but I'm pretty sure you can just grab the binary out of the container image and run there locally if you want to.

It'll produce a Linux image of course, if you're on macOS or Windows you'd have to create a native image for those platforms manually.

Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#56

Post by stevekemp »

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?

Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#57

Post by jeroenhd »

asteroidburger wrote: post #6
kay_o wrote: post #3

is all of this is vibe coded?

Does it matter?

I'll have a much harder time convincing my company to try out such a tool if it's AI slop than when there's a group of people behind it.

I'll happily use it for personal development stuff if I ever decide to try cloud stuff in my free time, but it's hardly an alternative to established projects like LocalStack for serious business needs.

Not that any of it should matter to the people behind this project of course, they can run and make it in whatever way they want. They stand to lose nothing if I can't convince my boss and they probably shouldn't care.

Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#58

Post by hrmtst93837 »

cebert wrote: post #12

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…

[flagged]

Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#59

Post by thedelanyo »

stevekemp wrote: post #56

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?

Could also be a vibe coded project.

Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#60

Post by colechristensen »

stevekemp wrote: post #56

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?

I don't understand why you'd be making this comment when the commit history shows this whole project is a week old.

>how do we know it won't be sent elsewhere?how do we know it won't be sent elsewhere?

I the past open source meant that you trusted in theory that someone else would notice and report these things. These days though just load up your LLM of choice and ask it to do a security audit. There are some unreliable ways to cheat this and they aren't magical, but it would be pretty hard to subvert this kind of audit.

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