Floci: Locally emulating any cloud service

(floci.io)

152 points | by theanonymousone 14 hours ago ago

30 comments

  • enderyentar a few seconds ago ago

    Nice. Emulators like this are great for the parts you own, but I've learned to be careful with anything that leaves your system. Email is the one that got me: a local SES stub happily accepts every message, and then in the real world the mail bounces or lands in spam because of DNS records or the receiving provider's rules. The emulator just tells you your code made the call, not that anything actually arrived. So I still keep one small end-to-end test against the real thing for those paths.

  • huffer 12 hours ago ago

    I just spilled my coffee; sorry for the trivial remark, but the name means 'pubic hairs' in Romanian. Apologies.. I thought it's better for you to know and ignore than not to (not quite a big population target for you, I imagine, anyway).

    • luis_cho 5 hours ago ago

      There was once a cloud conference in Brazil called ConaCloud. I'm guessing "cona" means something different in Brazilian Portuguese than it does in European Portuguese. In Portugal is a slang word for vagina.

    • nxobject 2 hours ago ago

      As Coq (now Rcoq) found to their chagrin... I'm convinced half of the reason Lean has surpassed Coq in mindshare in formal mathematics was because it's impossible to not chuckle at the name sometimes.

    • dazzatron 11 hours ago ago

      schaamhaar.io was already taken

      • OptionOfT 4 hours ago ago

        Risky copy-paste of the day.

    • Vasbarlog 8 hours ago ago
      • mitxela 7 hours ago ago

        Do Greek people really say "Here comes the spunk!" when they're... you know?

        • stavros 17 minutes ago ago

          Do English speakers say that?!

        • Vasbarlog 6 hours ago ago

          Hahahaha, have never personally heard that.

      • khimaros 6 hours ago ago

        though not nearly as popular of an expression in that category as μαλάκας

    • stevekemp 7 hours ago ago

      One of the later pages mentions that the name came from "cirrocumulus floccus", the cloud formation.

      • adrian_b 6 hours ago ago

        In this case it is misspelled.

        The Latin word is "flocci", which means hairs of wool, and it was also used to denote an insignificant thing.

        English normally preserves the double consonants of Latin, and in this case it has already done this in the English words derived from "floccus", e.g. "to flocculate" and "flocculent".

        In clouds, it was used due to the resemblance of those clouds with curly sheep wool.

        • illiac786 2 hours ago ago

          You mean like Flikr, sonarr, tumblr, Waze…?

    • coolca 7 hours ago ago

      Also it means gays (not in a flattering way) in italian if you just change a letter.

    • pi-victor 11 hours ago ago

      you got here before me, had a good laugh tho.

  • thegagne 9 hours ago ago

    The cool part of this is it’s an example of what’s possible with a community of users armed with AI.

    Many users, (myself included), had need to test cloud stuff locally, but had no tool to do so. Localstack exists, but it started rug pulling the free tier and they didn’t support all the features.

    Meanwhile, Floci makes it easy to write your own cloud compatible test suite, then implement the feature to match. I was able to get a good enough coverage on a few features created in a weekend on the $20 tier of Claude to make it useful to me, then others picked up the work to round it out.

    It’s really cool to see it grow.

    • didgeoridoo 7 hours ago ago

      I’d love to see this for stuff like Stripe, Twilio, etc - they’ve got sandboxes but this would be a lot easier and faster.

  • catlifeonmars 5 hours ago ago

    Both localstack and floci live in this weird spot where for a lot of my applications, all the cloud-vendor specific stuff is abstracted out anyway. So the only time I need to touch the cloud is for testing the abstractions and do end to end testing. The abstractions can be tested against real cloud APIs as it is generally cheap to do and provides the highest fidelity results. End to end testing includes testing against a production-like environment, so again, more bang for your buck to just test against the cloud.

    I’ve definitely reached for these local cloud tools from time to time, but in a well-architected piece of software, you aren’t getting that much value from them. Either you don’t have a hard cloud dependency, or you want a high fidelity test of a specific cloud dependency.

  • microflash 9 hours ago ago

    Been using it for a while to run integration tests with Testcontainers [1]. It's very good and much more lightweight than Localstack.

    [1]: https://testcontainers.com/

  • aeagentic 11 hours ago ago

    Would someone be interested in this but intended for production? Im already running a whole bunch of cloudflare and AWS services in my own AWS fake and it works surprisingly well! :)

  • michaelastreiko 4 hours ago ago

    Local stubs for cloud services are a lifesaver when you're a one-person shop and don't want a surprise bill just to test a webhook path.

  • kikimora 39 minutes ago ago

    How on earth I never came across this before? ChatGPD does not know about this project either. Looks very, very promising!

  • mkirsten 9 hours ago ago

    This looks very cool! Is this only intended for testing and development, or as a feasible way to migrante away from e.g., GCP as well?

    I’m interested in something that would allow me to over time migrante away from a GCP project that uses many services today - e.g., Datastore, FileStorage etc.

    • _bohm 9 hours ago ago

      Definitely not feasible to migrate off of actual cloud services using something like this.

  • VoidWhisperer 6 hours ago ago

    Most likely a false positive, but worth noting for the people who run the project: Malwarebytes currently flags the site as 'potentially unsafe' when trying to visit it - not sure what the best avenue for them to get that fixed beyond reaching out to Malwarebytes might be

  • n738 6 hours ago ago

    This is awesome, hope to see it mature over the years!

  • kwkelly 8 hours ago ago

    fakecloud is another project in the space, AWS only though https://fakecloud.dev/

    • rirze 6 hours ago ago

      I'm using fakecloud and it's dead simple to use. (like you said, aws only)

  • elendilm 12 hours ago ago

    Good work.

    For us, floci-oci for object storage looks interesting. For everything else we have our own stack.