Developer Hector Vent, publishing under the GitHub handle hectorvent, released Floci, a free and open-source local AWS emulator that requires no account creation and deploys via a single Docker Compose command. As of April 2, 2026, the repository had accumulated 2.5k GitHub stars and 114 forks.
- Floci starts in approximately 24 milliseconds with 13 MiB idle memory, versus LocalStack’s reported 3.3-second startup and 143 MiB footprint.
- The project claims to pass 408 out of 408 AWS SDK tests and supports over 20 AWS services.
- The Floci Docker image weighs 90 MB, compared to LocalStack’s 1.0 GB image.
- Several services are included that are absent from LocalStack’s community edition, among them Cognito, ElastiCache with IAM authentication, and RDS for PostgreSQL and MySQL.
What Happened
Developer Hector Vent published Floci as a free and open-source local AWS emulator requiring no account creation, no authentication tokens, and no feature restrictions, positioning it against LocalStack’s community edition following that tool’s introduction of mandatory auth tokens, CI/CD restrictions, and frozen security updates for free-tier users in March 2026. The project’s README describes its value proposition in a single line: “No account. No feature gates. Just docker compose up.”
The repository had logged 127 commits, 28 open issues, and 15 active pull requests as of April 2, 2026, indicating early but active development. The project is released under the MIT license and includes structured contribution guidelines and a Code of Conduct, suggesting Vent is building toward a sustained open-source project. The name Floci is derived from floccus, a meteorological term for the popcorn-shaped cloud formation, as noted in the repository’s README.
Why It Matters
Local AWS emulation sits at the center of cloud-native development testing workflows, allowing engineers to verify code against AWS-compatible service APIs without live credentials or cloud costs, and a change in the dominant tool’s licensing model forces developers to either pay for a subscription or migrate to an alternative. LocalStack has occupied that dominant position for several years, and its community edition was previously sufficient for most automated testing scenarios.
The March 2026 changes to LocalStack’s community edition — mandatory authentication tokens, CI/CD pipeline support restricted to paid tiers, and a freeze on security updates for free users — created a gap that Floci is directly targeting. For open-source maintainers and individual developers, the CI restriction is particularly consequential, as it affects automated test pipelines that run on every code push.
Technical Details
According to the project’s documentation, Floci starts in approximately 24 milliseconds with an idle memory footprint of 13 MiB, compared to LocalStack’s reported 3.3-second startup time and 143 MiB of idle memory — an approximately eleven-fold difference in memory consumption at rest. The Docker image is 90 MB, versus LocalStack’s 1.0 GB, a difference that has practical implications for CI environments where image pull time and storage costs accumulate across many pipeline runs.
The project claims to pass 408 out of 408 AWS SDK tests, a figure cited in the project documentation rather than an independently verified benchmark. It supports over 20 AWS services, several of which are not available in LocalStack’s free tier. These include API Gateway v2 (HTTP API), Amazon Cognito, ElastiCache with Redis and IAM authentication, and Amazon RDS with support for both PostgreSQL and MySQL via IAM authentication.
Floci also provides S3 Object Lock with both COMPLIANCE and GOVERNANCE retention modes. LocalStack’s community edition offers only partial support for this feature. The documentation states that endpoint connectivity is straightforward: “Use any AWS region — credentials can be anything,” meaning developers can pass arbitrary strings as AWS credentials when pointing SDKs at the emulator.
Who’s Affected
Software developers and DevOps engineers who depend on local AWS emulation for automated testing are the primary audience, with teams running open-source projects or operating under budget constraints most directly affected by LocalStack’s decision to move CI/CD pipeline support behind a paid subscription. Solo developers and small teams that previously relied on the LocalStack community edition for end-to-end local testing now face a choice between absorbing subscription costs or switching tools.
Migration from LocalStack to Floci requires minimal reconfiguration. Both tools expose services on http://localhost:4566, meaning developers can redirect existing AWS SDKs to Floci by updating the endpoint URL in test configuration files. No changes to application code are required for the endpoint switch itself, though service-specific behavior differences may require testing.
What’s Next
The Floci repository had 28 open issues and 15 active pull requests as of April 2, 2026, and its 127-commit history places it early in its development lifecycle relative to more established emulation tools. The project does not claim feature parity with LocalStack’s paid tiers, and sustained reliability at the service breadth it currently offers will depend on ongoing contributions from Vent and any collaborators who join the project.
Floci ships two Docker image variants — a native binary build and a JVM-based build — to accommodate different deployment environments. The repository includes an AGENT.md file alongside standard contribution documentation, suggesting some configuration intended for AI-assisted development workflows. Author details beyond the GitHub handle hectorvent were not available at time of publication.
