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

Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Mulga, the company behind this. Self-promo, but it's AGPL-3.0 and free to run. The Problem It Solves Spinifex reimplements the AWS APIs on hardware you own: EC2, EBS, S3, VPC, IAM, ALB/NLB, EKS, ECS, ECR and RDS. It's real compute: instances are actual QEMU VMs, and VPCs are real OVN networks with security groups and elastic IPs. It's not an emulator like LocalStack. Why not existing FOSS Most infrastructure tooling, docs and skills today assume AWS. If you want that model on your own hardware, the existing options each miss something: LocalStack and similar emulators mock the API for testing. Nothing really runs, and nothing persists like a real cloud. OpenStack is a real private cloud, but it has its own APIs, so your AWS Terraform, SDK code and knowledge don't carry across. Proxmox is a great hypervisor, but it isn't a cloud API. There's no VPC, IAM, S3 or EKS layer, and the Terraform is completely different. We built Spinifex so the AWS API itself is the interface: the same CLI, SDKs and Terraform, pointed at your own box. Why it's relevant Learn AWS without the bill. You can build the VPC-plus-EC2-plus-RDS stack from a cert course and leave it running for a month without a surprise invoice. Your Terraform works in both places. Keep one AWS profile for work and another for the rack in the cupboard. Single-node install from a USB or ISO. It comes up as a working one-node cluster, and you can join more nodes later. AI Disclosure Spinifex is designed and built by infrastructure engineers, including former AWS team members. We use Claude Code to speed up certain tasks: boilerplate for AWS API handlers, documentation, generating test cases, and large refactors. Architecture, security (authentication, encryption, threat modelling), performance tuning and production operations are done by people. Repo: github.com/mulgadc/spinifex