📄 Show Notes LocalStack shut down its free Community edition and put the AWS emulator behind an account and an auth token. One week before that, Hector Ventura open-sourced Floci, a free, MIT-licensed local cloud emulator. It now covers 125 AWS services plus Azure, GCP and Oracle Cloud, and has almost 27,000 GitHub stars. Bas Steins and Michal Martinka talk with Hector about how he rebuilt AWS from intercepted SDK traffic, why Google was the easiest cloud to emulate and AWS the hardest, and why AI coding agents need a cloud they can break. They also get into why Floci is written in Java instead of Go or Rust, and the less fun side of going viral in open source: PRs from accounts created the same day, CI runners that can't keep up, and no business model yet. ⏱️ Topics Covered - What Floci is and why local cloud emulation matters - LocalStack's paywall and Floci's timing - Rebuilding AWS from intercepted SDK requests, with help from AI - How close is "close enough" to real AWS? Using real Postgres for RDS and DuckDB for Athena - Google was easy, AWS was hard, and working with the AWS Smithy team - Emulators for students, CI/CD and AI agents (an EKS cluster in under a minute instead of 15) - Reviewing AI-written PRs and keeping the code readable - Limiting PRs per contributor in the age of "Sloptoberfest" - Why Java: Quarkus, GraalVM native images, Vert.x and Netty - From one Reddit post to a community-driven project - Open source burnout and the true cost of "free" - Monetization, investor calls and a possible hosted version - Could Floci become a test layer for Stelvio? 🌐 Resources & Links Floci on GitHub: https://github.com/floci-io/floci Floci website: https://floci.io/ LocalStack pricing changes: https://blog.localstack.cloud/2026-upcoming-pricing-changes/ Smithy: https://smithy.io/ Quarkus: https://quarkus.io/ GraalVM: https://www.graalvm.org/ Stelvio: https://stelvio.dev/ Stelvio on GitHub: https://github.com/stelviodev/stelvio