Foojay Podcast #96: Local AWS Development Without LocalStack: Meet Floci, the GraalVM-Powered Alternative
What if you could run 35 AWS services locally in under 25 milliseconds, using just 13 megabytes of memory, with a single Docker command and no cloud bill? That’s exactly what Floci does.
In this episode, Frank Delporte talks with Hector Ventura, the creator of Floci, a free and open-source cloud emulator built with Quarkus and GraalVM native compilation. Hector walks us through why he built it when LocalStack dropped its open-source community edition, how AI tooling helped him accelerate development of new service integrations, the challenges of keeping GraalVM happy with third-party libraries, and the road ahead for Azure and GCP support.
If you’re a developer who wants fast local testing, a DevOps engineer writing Terraform, or a student learning cloud without the cost, Floci is worth a look!
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Guest: Hector Ventura
Links
- On Foojay: Introducing Floci: A High-Performance, GraalVM-Powered AWS Emulator
- Floci project site
- Floci on GitHub
- Migrate from LocalStack
Content
00:00 Introduction of topic and guest
01:48 What is Floci?
02:15 How Floci compares to LocalStack
03:01 Why Hector started Floci
04:02 Floci emulates the cloud APIs
05:02 How additional services got integrated with AI assistance
06:31 Meaning of the name Floci
07:07 Why Quarkus and GraalVM as the starting point for Floci
09:35 How Floci starts up very fast and only uses a low amount of memory
12:18 GraalVM can be hard with some libraries or frameworks
14:02 What is needed to use Floci
14:56 The challenges to support AWS, Azure, GCP and finding contributors
20:24 Funding Floci
21:04 How data is persisted in Floci
22:37 Verifying Floci versus the “real” APIs with compatibility tests
23:56 In the future: UI for Floci
25:04 Biggest challenges while creating Floci
25:32 Functionality compared between Floci and LocalStack and migrating
28:15 Feedback from the Floci users
28:58 Long-term plans for Floci
29:59 Biggest surprises during the development of Floci
31:00 Best use-cases for Floci
32:12 In the next releases…
33:31 How to get started with Floci
35:00 Conclusion
Frank Delporte
Frank Delporte is a Java Champion, Java Developer, Senior Technical Writer at Azul, Blogger, Author of "Java Programming for Raspberry Pi - A Hands-On Guide to Electronics and IoT Projects", and Open-Source Contributor for Pi4J, Lottie4J, MelodyMatrix,... …
Hector Ventura
I'm a software engineer with more than 10 years of experience. Developing software based on Java, SpringBoot, and Java EE. Also, involve with new Java frameworks like Quarkus and Vertx.io.