I maintain LocalEmu, a free and open-source (Apache 2.0) AWS emulator. It started as a fork of the archived LocalStack Community edition. The goal is to keep a genuinely free, open local AWS emulator alive and maintained.
What it does:
- Emulates 132 AWS services on a single endpoint (
localhost:4566) - Pure-Python core, with real Docker engines for Lambda, EC2, RDS, ECS, EKS, and OpenSearch
- Point your existing AWS CLI, boto3, Terraform, CDK, or Pulumi at it, zero config
- No account, no auth token, no telemetry. Persistent state across restarts
- Optional fidelity knobs: IAM policy enforcement, throttling, latency injection, Lambda cold starts
Why I built it: kill the multi-minute deploy loop, drop the dev/test AWS bill to zero, and stop keeping real credentials on dev machines.
It’s for fast local dev, testing, and learning, not production, and not bit-for-bit parity with the real cloud.
Repo: https://github.com/localemu/localemu Site: https://localemu.cloud/
Happy to answer questions, and feedback is very welcome.
Those are all good questions, about the vendors the companies I buy things from, and my responsibility in their actions
Maybe I should use less products that use AWS and you could consider your impact when using large language models to publish open source software. I’m almost certain both are in fact true statements, and if you knew me, you’d know I think “should” is strong language
If you want me to make a list of the products and services I avoid? How about this: I feel guilt when I use a service or buy a thing from someone I know I shouldn’t. I try not to do it out of pure convenience, and I don’t try to defend the behavior when I fuck up
Im truly sorry you suffered the ire of those who think your use of it is both wreckless and purely conveience based, but thems the breaks when you want to cut corners, dont care if its a hobby project or youre curing cancer- we can break the planet in scales previously unimaginable with our short sighted behaviour and Im about damn tired of “but everybody else is doing it”
why not try building a community around coding and maintaing an AWS stack replacement? maybe other human beings would help you with the parts you could use some help with?