Why I'm building a free, open-source AWS emulator

A few days ago, our CI started failing. The culprit: localstack:latest now requires an account and an auth token. Broken builds.

I'd seen LocalStack creeping toward proprietary for a while, but this was the moment it actually hit. A colleague noticed it at the same time as me, but I was already working on a fix. I patched the build, but the question stuck: how long can we keep using the old version until we start having real problems?

I don't trust mocks

I should back up. I care about tests a lot. Enough to become a . It's AGPL-3.0 — free and open source, including for commercial use.

If you need a local AWS emulator for your integration tests, give it a try. And if something doesn't behave like real AWS — open an issue. That's a bug, and we'll fix it.