fakecloud and Floci: two free LocalStack alternatives, side by side

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0700

I needed a local AWS environment — a sandbox to poke at services without the pain of a properly configured account. For a few weeks that was Floci, an open-source drop-in replacement for LocalStack Community. The best free option I found — I wrote about it.

Then I wanted CloudFront in my local emulator. Floci doesn’t implement it. LocalStack ships CloudFront only in its paid tiers.

fakecloud (also free and open source) does implement CloudFront. And Route 53. And WAFv2. And Cognito. And Bedrock. 105 services, a single ~19 MB binary, no auth tokens, no account. Btw, it’s written in Rust :)

So I set up both, side by side: one repo, two Docker Compose profiles, one justfile. Switch engines per workload.

Fakecloud on Kostiantyn Lysenko

fakecloud and Floci: two free LocalStack alternatives, side by side