Floci: Locally emulating any cloud service(floci.io)
217 points by theanonymousone 18 days ago | 49 comments
tl;dr: Floci is a set of MIT-licensed native binaries that locally emulate AWS (119 services), Azure (28), GCP (25), and OCI (8), positioning itself as a faster, credential-free alternative to LocalStack (which reportedly began requiring auth tokens in March 2026). It boasts 24ms startup and 13 MiB idle memory using GraalVM Mandrel, runs real engines (Docker-based Lambda, actual PostgreSQL/MySQL for RDS, real Redis), and offers a unified CLI and dashboard. It's pitched particularly at AI coding agents that need a safe sandbox to iterate against without touching real cloud accounts.
HN Discussion:
  • ↑Floci is a welcome lightweight alternative to LocalStack, especially for integration testing
  • ↑Local cloud emulation is valuable for solo devs and AI coding workflows to avoid surprise bills and enable fast iteration
  • ↓Cloud emulators have limited utility since vendor-specific code is usually abstracted and better tested against real APIs
  • ↓Digital twins/mocked APIs risk subtle behavioral drift from real services, causing production issues
  • •Nostalgic reference to prior emulation efforts like Eucalyptus that faded away