State of the Flock #001: Four Months of Floci
Month four: 16.7k stars, 861k Docker pulls, 11 new AWS services across nine releases, and the start of a numbered monthly series about how Floci actually gets built, including the parts that are not going well.
Four months ago, on March 15, I open sourced Floci. I wrote a recap at one month and another at three months. Starting now, this becomes a numbered monthly series: State of the Flock.
Why “the Flock”? Floci is named after floccus, the popcorn-shaped cloud formation. A flock is many small birds moving together, with no single point of failure. Four months in, that is exactly what this community has become, and it deserves a name. So: welcome to the Flock.
Every issue will have the same skeleton: the numbers, what shipped, who made it happen, what I have not decided yet, what is not going well, and one specific ask. The honesty sections are not optional. If this project is going to be the free local cloud emulator people rely on, you should be able to watch it being built for real, including the rough parts.
The numbers
| Metric | 3 months (Jun 15) | 4 months (Jul 15) |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars (floci) | 14,000 | 16,700 |
| Forks | 1,300 | 1,670 |
| Contributors | 147 | 179 |
| Merged PRs (all time) | ~900 | 1,007 |
| Docker pulls | first time reporting | 861,000 |
| AWS services | 58 | 69 |
| Releases this month | first time reporting | 9 (1.5.25 through 1.5.33) |
Eleven new AWS services in one month is the fastest catalog expansion since launch, and floci crossed 1,000 merged PRs this month. A star is a bookmark and a fork is someone opening the hood, so the number I watch most is contributors: 32 people sent their first merged PR to floci in the last month alone.
What shipped: nine releases in thirty days
The full notes are on GitHub, but four themes defined the month.
Eleven new AWS services. EMR, WAF v2, AWS Batch, and the RDS Data API landed in 1.5.25. DocumentDB in 1.5.26. S3 Vectors (#1435, thanks @kapoorp99), MemoryDB (#1420, thanks @ahmedk20), CodePipeline, and EC2 Network ACLs in 1.5.27. IoT Core (#1359, thanks @nblomquist) and Elastic Beanstalk in 1.5.28. Amazon MQ and VPC Flow Logs in 1.5.30. And AWS Lightsail in 1.5.32. That takes the catalog from 58 to 69.
Amazon MQ is a good example of the philosophy: it is backed by a real RabbitMQ broker in Docker, not a mock. Same pattern as RDS (real Postgres), MSK (real Redpanda), and OpenSearch. If your code talks to a message broker locally, it should talk to a real one.
State that survives restarts. ECS, CodeBuild, AWS Config, CodeDeploy, Transcribe, Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda, and API Gateway all joined the durable-state family this month, and a shutdown-flush fix (#1607) closed a window where changes right before shutdown could be lost. There are also new state reset and nuke endpoints (#1482) for CI suites that want a clean slate without a container restart.
AppSync is complete. Five phases across five releases took AppSync from a management-API stub to a working GraphQL emulator: the full VTL engine landed in #1288 by @AgustinBertagna, and Phase 5 (#1590) finished the build-out with schema registry and AWS-aligned behavior. Resolver templates now execute with real semantics instead of fixture responses.
Multi-account IAM got real. Assumed-role credentials now route to the target account (#1549, thanks @abanna), trust policies can be enforced (#1552), STS session policies are enforced (#1636), and CloudFormation StackSets provision account-aware (#1551). Enterprise-style multi-account IaC now runs locally, end to end.
Also worth a line each: CloudWatch Logs Insights queries (#1448), HTTPS on port 443, a big Step Functions push (versions, ECS integration, ResultSelector, JSONata variables), EKS Fargate profiles (#1523), Steampipe support (#1538), and faster Lambda cold starts via read-only code mounts (#1673).
Across the clouds
floci-az shipped 0.8.0 and now covers 22 Azure services. floci-gcp shipped 0.4.0 and covers 22 GCP services, up from 7 at the three-month mark, including real k3s-backed GKE and real Postgres behind Cloud SQL.
Who is using Floci
Last month I wrote up who is actually using Floci in detail, so here is the short version plus what changed. Apache Camel runs its AWS suite against Floci and it got faster in the process: 6.5 minutes down to 4.5. Just Eat Takeaway.com uses it in JustSaying. Three UK government programs (DEFRA, NHS Digital, and GOV.UK One Login) have migrated services or have migrations in flight. And the tooling ecosystem keeps making Floci easier to pick up: Testcontainers for .NET ships a first-party Floci module, Spring Cloud AWS uses it in integration tests, and Quarkus includes it as a dev-services provider.
Two adoption notes new since that post. Atmos
(from Cloud Posse) now ships Floci as its default local
emulator for AWS, GCP, and Azure: floci/aws is the free, MIT-licensed default, with
LocalStack demoted to an opt-in alternative. And Chant
runs the full Floci suite, one emulator per cloud, to exercise real CloudFormation, ARM,
and Config Connector deployments locally without touching a cloud account.
If your team uses Floci and is willing to be named, tell me. Nothing sells a local emulator to a skeptical platform team like other platform teams.
Sponsors
A handful of people and companies now sponsor Floci’s development: IceGuard, Softmax, Nexxion.ai, Albert E. Hidalgo Taveras, Matheus Oliveira, and Allan Pereira Abrahão. Thank you. Infrastructure, CI minutes, and the hours behind the releases this month are real costs, and you are carrying part of them.
To be clear about what sponsorship means here: it buys gratitude and nothing else. Every emulated service is free for everyone, forever, and no sponsor gets features, priority, or roadmap influence that the rest of the Flock does not. If Floci saves your team time and you want to help sustain it: github.com/sponsors/floci-io.
Flock highlights
32 people had their first PR merged into floci this month. A few I want to call out by name:
- @shrimptails-f ran a coordinated Cognito conformance pass across three releases (#1488, #1484, #1571), the kind of unglamorous alignment work that makes an emulator trustworthy.
- @jvanzyl brought EC2 instance metadata and image catalogs (#1596, #1601), so IaC that references real instance types and custom AMIs behaves like it does on AWS.
- @dnlopes and @LorenzoGalassi, welcome to the Flock.
Open decisions: help me name a thing
All the persistence work above is building toward a bigger feature: portable, shareable state artifacts for your local cloud. The working name is Floci Pods, and the artifact itself needs a name. Two candidates already got voted off the island internally. Rather than decide alone, I opened a poll: Name the Floci state artifact. It runs through July 31.
This is the first of what will be a standing section. Big decisions will show up here as open GitHub Discussions or ADRs before they are final, and your input genuinely changes outcomes.
The other open question this month is Testcontainers structure. The AWS emulator has Testcontainers modules for Java, .NET, Go, Node, and Python. floci-az and floci-gcp have none. Before I spin up six more standalone repos, I want to get the shape right: one module per cloud per language across many repos, or a single multi-cloud module per language where you pick the image. If you have built or maintained Testcontainers modules and have an opinion, that design discussion is open and I would rather settle it now than refactor five repos later.
What’s not going well
- The other two clouds are still mostly me. floci has 179 contributors; floci-az has 7 and floci-gcp has 6. The multi-cloud story will not scale as a one-person effort per cloud.
- The Testcontainers modules are under-maintained, and I own too many of them. There are five: Java, .NET, Go, Node, and Python. The Java one has real activity and a real backlog. Others have not been touched in weeks. This is exactly the kind of surface that should not depend on one person, and right now it mostly does. I am looking for 2 to 3 maintainers per module: people who already use one in their own tests and want commit rights and a real say. If that is you, ping me directly (Slack, or open an issue on the module repo) and we will talk. Naming co-maintainers here is the honest fix for the bus-factor problem, and a flock is supposed to have no single point of failure.
- Star growth is slowing. 4k in month one, 11k, 14k, and about 17k now. That is the natural post-launch curve and I would rather say it than pretend otherwise.
- 134 open issues on the main repo and triage latency is creeping up.
One ask this month
Vote in the Pods naming poll. It takes thirty seconds, and the name you pick will be typed by thousands of people in CI configs for years. No pressure.
Thank you
To the 32 people who sent their first PR this month, to the maintainers reviewing at all hours, and to everyone running Floci in their pipelines and filing sharp bug reports: thank you. Floci stays free, MIT-licensed, no gates, no telemetry. Forever.
Same time next month for #002
Join the Flock: GitHub · r/floci · Slack · LinkedIn
Any Cloud. Locally. Let’s keep Emulating.
Originally published on LinkedIn.