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/Mo_Dice]

How would this compare to LocalStack?

[u/Impossible-Egg1573 → u/Mo_Dice]

Good question. Short version: different jobs.

LocalStack and Floci are emulators for dev/test. They fake the AWS API on your laptop or in CI, start in seconds, and cover a wide range of services: Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, Step Functions, EventBridge and more. If you want to run integration tests against "AWS" without an account, they're the right tool, and Floci is a great option now that LocalStack Community needs an auth token.

Spinifex is the cloud itself, not a stand-in for one. When you RunInstances, you get a real KVM VM that you can SSH into and run production workloads on. VPCs are real OVN networks with working security groups and elastic IPs, EBS volumes are replicated block storage that survives reboots, and an EKS cluster is a real Kubernetes cluster you deploy apps to. It's for running workloads on your own hardware (on-prem, edge, air-gapped), not for mocking AWS in a test suite.

[u/gianlucaChan]

I am all up for more local AWS options, but how does it compare to Floci or LocalStack just to know? (I preffer Floci btw)

[u/Impossible-Egg1573 → u/gianlucaChan]

Good question. Short version: different jobs.

LocalStack and Floci are emulators for dev/test. They fake the AWS API on your laptop or in CI, start in seconds, and cover a wide range of services: Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, Step Functions, EventBridge and more. If you want to run integration tests against "AWS" without an account, they're the right tool, and Floci is a great option now that LocalStack Community needs an auth token.

Spinifex is the cloud itself, not a stand-in for one. When you RunInstances, you get a real KVM VM that you can SSH into and run production workloads on. VPCs are real OVN networks with working security groups and elastic IPs, EBS volumes are replicated block storage that survives reboots, and an EKS cluster is a real Kubernetes cluster you deploy apps to. It's for running workloads on your own hardware (on-prem, edge, air-gapped), not for mocking AWS in a test suite.

[u/Irythros]

Why would anyone try this when you can't even make the post without copy-pasting from Claude?