We are on a mission to build high-fidelity local emulators for cloud, and have started off with AWS and GCP (currently for corresponding compute services). Now anyone can build and test infrastructure on your machine, no account required.
Check out the Vera website for more information.
Cloud infrastructure is expensive to experiment with. Even a quick test — spinning up a virtual machine, creating a network, attaching a disk — means provisioning real resources, waiting on remote APIs, and paying for what you use. Mistakes cost money and time, and teardown is never instant.
Vera runs the cloud on your laptop. It mimics the APIs of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform locally, so your tools: CLI, Terraform, Python SDKs behave exactly as they would against the real thing, except everything happens on your machine in milliseconds, with no credentials, no cost, and no cleanup required.
No account needed. Vera ships with fake credentials built in. You never authenticate against a real cloud provider, which means there's nothing to sign up for, nothing to configure, and no risk of accidentally hitting production.
Fast feedback. Because requests never leave your machine, operations that would take seconds or minutes against a real cloud complete instantly. Iterating on infrastructure code becomes as fast as iterating on any other code.
Works with your existing tools. Vera doesn't require you to change how you write infrastructure. Standard AWS CLI commands, standard gcloud commands, standard Terraform configurations — all of them work against Vera without modification.
Safe by default. There's no way to accidentally destroy a real resource or incur a surprise bill. Every resource lives in memory and disappears when you stop the emulator.
Broad coverage. Vera covers 89 AWS EC2 resource types and 91 GCP Compute resource types — VPCs, instances, disks, firewalls, load balancers, routing, snapshots, and much more. It handles the full lifecycle of the resources developers actually use day to day.
Emulates the Amazon EC2 API with support for 89 resource types. Drop-in wrappers for the AWS CLI (awscli) and Terraform (terlocal) are included, so you can run your existing commands and configurations unchanged.
In head-to-head testing against 260 real AWS CLI commands, Vera AWS passes 80% — compared to 47% for LocalStack.
Emulates the Google Cloud Compute API with support for 91 resource types. A drop-in wrapper for the gcloud CLI (gcpcli) handles credential isolation automatically, so gcloud compute commands route to the local emulator with no real Google account required. The Google Cloud Compute Python SDK is also supported.
Seeded resources (a default network, common zones, machine types, and image families) are available immediately on startup with no setup needed.
Each emulator lives in its own directory under emulators/. Setup is a single command:
# AWS
cd emulators/aws-ec2
./install.sh
uv run main.py
# GCP
cd emulators/google-compute
./install.sh
uv run main.py From there, use awscli, terlocal, or gcpcli exactly as you would their real counterparts. See the individual READMEs for usage examples, test suites, and the full list of supported resources.
| Emulator | Resources | |---|---|---| | Vera AWS | 89 EC2 resource types | | Vera GCP | 91 Compute resource types |
Full resource lists are in each emulator's README.
