Local Cloud Emulation and Self-Hosting Keep Gaining Ground
Floci launched as a tool for locally emulating cloud services (OCI object storage, and more), and a commenter immediately noted they're running their own AWS fake in production for a range of Cloudflare and AWS services. HomelabFest is planned for St. Louis in 2027 and drawing genuine enthusiasm. The 'Who's still keeping a DOS machine up' thread, while a curiosity piece, underlines how long infrastructure decisions persist and how often the answer is 'because replacing it is riskier than running it.'
The through-line: self-hosting and local emulation are no longer just hobbyist activities. The combination of cost pressure, cloud reliability incidents (the AWS billing bug showing $109 billion phantom charges caused real panic), and sovereignty concerns is pushing more builders toward owning more of their stack.
The Cloudflare-blocks-Docker-in-Spain-during-La-Liga incident is the most absurd version of this, where infrastructure dependencies on large intermediaries created a production incident with no warning and no recourse.
So what?
If your development or CI pipeline depends on pulling from Docker Hub or any Cloudflare-proxied resource, that dependency is fragile in ways that have nothing to do with your code. Tools like Floci for local emulation reduce that surface area during development. For production, the 'multi-provider' argument keeps coming up for good reason.
Read these
Floci: Locally emulating any cloud service
Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?
Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block
AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion