Foojay Podcast #96: Local AWS Development Without LocalStack: Meet Floci, the GraalVM-Powered Alternative
- May 25, 2026
- 2 min read
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
- May 25, 2026
- 2 min read
Frank Delporte is a Java Champion, Java Developer, Technical Writer at Azul, Blogger, Author of "Getting started with Java on Raspberry Pi", and Pi4J Contributor. Frank blogs about his experiments with Java and JavaFX, sometimes combined with electronic components, on the Raspberry Pi.
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.
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