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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

#71

Post by redserk »

dgxyz wrote: post #68
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…

I disagree with this entirely. You should build your software around abstractions and interfaces which are portable enough to work locally and in AWS or any other cloud and not just AWS specific APIs.

I agree that this is what everyone should strive to do but this quickly hits a limit.

For example, IAM/S3/SQS policy evaluations can have profound impact on an application running but an abstraction wouldn’t help much here (assuming the developer is putting any thought into securing things). There just isn’t an alternative to these. If you’re rolling out an application using AWS-proprietary services, you have to get into vendor-specific functionality.

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

#73

Post by shrikant »

hmartin wrote: post #24
borplk wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear that it would be a net-negative on the revenue. It could encourage more development and adoption and lead to being a net-positive for the revenue.

It's a fair point but iff you neglect that the overwhelming revenue drivers for these services are large corps who are already locked-in. Devx doesn't matter at all once you're there. The myopathy among us "online people" is assuming number of voices here and elsewhere correlate to revenue. It does not.

Just fyi, myopathy is a general term for diseases that affect some types of muscles, while myopia is short-sightedness -- assuming the latter is what you were going for!

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

#74

Post by drzaiusx11 »

QGQBGdeZREunxLe wrote: post #2

> 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.

Unfortunate that they're closing up after all these years. That said, I have their enterprise license at work and it has been fantastic, saving thousands of dev hours by giving our team tighter feedback loops without having to wait for ages on cloudformation deployments. LocalStack allows me to test my changes on the train without even an internet connection (the keys are baked into our dev containers)

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

#75

Post by drzaiusx11 »

4riel wrote: post #47

24ms startup is the real story 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

This is why I use LocalStack today. I can stand up all my infra for my teams 14 microservices in under 30s and test my in flight changes, all without an internet connection. Deploying to our real staging environments take 30m (literally) for a single CDK / cloudformation stack change. The fact I have an immediate feedback loop saves my team inordinate amounts of time. Cloudformation deployments are criminally slow.

I recently discussed this with an adjacent org that didn't use a local environment at all outside of junit mocks for unit testing, and their deployment pipelines take over 45m per commit. Ridiculous.

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

#76

Post by drzaiusx11 »

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.

http://docs.getmoto.org/en/latest/docs/services/index.html

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

#77

Post by mdavid626 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #55
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…

Yeah, compare this with downloading single binary approach.

Downloading JDK, setting up the correct env variables, or running Docker, all this is just pain, compared to single binary approach.

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

#78

Post by dgxyz »

redserk wrote: post #71
dgxyz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this entirely. You should build your software around abstractions and interfaces which are portable enough to work locally and in AWS or any other cloud and not just AWS specific APIs.

I agree that this is what everyone should strive to do but this quickly hits a limit. For example, IAM/S3/SQS policy evaluations can have profound impact on an application running but an abstraction wouldn’t help much here (assuming the developer is putting any thought into securing things). There just isn’t an alternative to these. If you’re rolling out an application using AWS-proprietary services, you have to get…

My point is you should not build on top of their native services if it incurs this problem.

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

#79

Post by drzaiusx11 »

operator_nil wrote: post #13

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 contin…

How is it in AWS' best interest to provide support or changes for a FOSS clone (albeit with ephemeral storage)? I believe that providing locked down local-first containers themselves for various services (which they do for services like ddb) would make more sense. I'm sure no one at AWS would take a bug report seriously saying random FOSS thing doesn't work with their official client sdks...

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

#80

Post by drzaiusx11 »

localhoster wrote: post #69

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.

Tools like this one are for local-first development, obviously you still need "real" staging environments. Deploying changes to staging takes significant time due to cloudformation being horribly slow. This is to move faster so you have tighter feedback loops for infra changes.
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