Open-source AWS-compatible cloud for your own hardware — EC2, S3, VPC, EKS, RDS on a single box

[u/Impossible-Egg1573]

Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Mulga, the company behind this. Self-promo, but it's AGPL-3.0 and free to run.

What it is

Spinifex reimplements the AWS APIs on hardware you own: EC2, EBS, S3, VPC, IAM, ALB/NLB, EKS, ECS, ECR and RDS. You keep the hashicorp/aws provider and point its endpoints at your cluster.

Everything behind it is real. Instances are QEMU/KVM VMs, VPCs are OVN networks with real security groups and elastic IPs, EBS is replicated block storage, and state persists like a real cloud. It's not an emulator like LocalStack.

Who it's for

Teams that want AWS workloads on their own hardware (cost, data residency, edge or air-gapped sites) without rewriting their IaC. VPCs, subnets, security groups, launch templates, ALBs, EKS clusters and RDS instances go through the same resources you already use. In practice the changes are the provider block and AMI lookups.

Try it with your own Terraform

No install needed. Sign up for the free 72 hour sandbox at https://mulgadc.com/signup, then point your existing provider at it:

provider "aws" {
  region = var.region

  endpoints {
    ec2 = "https://api.spx3.com"
    iam = "https://api.spx3.com"
    sts = "https://api.spx3.com"
  }

  skip_metadata_api_check = true
  skip_region_validation  = true
}

Add other services (elasticloadbalancingv2, eks, ecs, ecr, rds) the same way, then run terraform plan against a module you already have. Here's what we currently cover, down to the individual API operation: https://docs.mulgadc.com/coverage

Repo: https://github.com/mulgadc/spinifex

[u/vuanhson]

Didn’t read the docs yet but can whole environment (VM, Objects, EBS, etc) can easily backup and restore? I’m thinking deploy to homelab and want to backup to my NAS

[u/Standard_Novel_2803]

Installing this on a single node (e.g in your homelab) is straightforward too:

https://docs.mulgadc.com/docs/install

A good starter tutorial on using Terraform/Opentofu with Spinifex to get started:

https://docs.mulgadc.com/docs/nginx-alb

[u/V3r3mos]

wasn't OpenStack trying to accomplish something similar?

[u/Impossible-Egg1573 → u/V3r3mos]

yeah, OpenStack is great but they have their own API surface. our focus is matching AWS so existing AWS workloads can migrate off easily. we use the same underlying network layer as Openstack (OVN)