Hiraeth
AWS Emulator
Details
- External ID
- 47787947
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Hiraeth
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- April 16, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 40
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8232647814910026
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
With the recent changes around Localstack pricing/licensing I've been hunting for alternatives. I decided that it might be a fun experiment to try rolling my own. SQS is a service I use heavily so I chose that as the first service to implement. I have more services planned and in development.A few things I think are cool:4MB Docker Image SizeInstant StartupAWS Sigv4 AuthenticationA little admin UI that can be helpful for development/troubleshootingMost of the SQS API implemented, the rest will soon follow :)
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- local AWS emulator
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Emulating a subset of a single service like SQS is straightforward, but building a usable AWS emulator requires accurately reproducing complex distributed system semantics, XML/JSON protocols, and edge-case compatibility across multiple AWS APIs.
What it would actually take: A working system requires an HTTP server implementing AWS Signature v4 auth and the exact wire protocols (XML/JSON/query protocols) of AWS services. The backend needs in-memory or embedded database state engines mimicking message visibility timeouts, deduplication windows, FIFO ordering, and DLQ semantics. While AI can write standard CRUD mock handlers, ensuring behavioral fidelity against official AWS SDKs and integration suites requires tedious manual protocol reverse engineering and deep distributed systems debugging.
Discussion
13 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: LocalStack, SmoothMQ
Concerns raised: Request validation gaps still need work, Response formats and codes are best effort, Why not test on real AWS with smaller instances instead
Feature requests: ECS/Fargate emulator that runs actual Docker containers locally, Simulated billing/cost explorer
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 75 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #16 of 76 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 168 days after the earliest competitor.
- I've built a nice home server OS · hn · 2026-04-24 · 194 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Bill My Cloud, a simple no-nonsense AWS cost estimator · hn · 2025-12-31 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Is Hormuz open yet? · hn · 2026-04-08 · 484 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Lightweight C++23 S3 client with no extra deps (just curl and OpenSSL) · hn · 2026-06-13 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Fakecloud · hn · 2026-04-15 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- awesome-cloud-emulators · github · 2026-09-28 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- I built self-hosted deployment automation tool for Windows and IIS · hn · 2026-08-25 · 35 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Out Plane · hn · 2026-02-24 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.38
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.