// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Using floci to emulate Cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure)
Say welcome to Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure!
With the release of FlowG 1.0 steadily approaching, our team looked into what our users could be missing from our first stable release.
While already having eight general-purpose forwarders, we were missing direct integrations with major cloud providers.
All three of the biggest cloud providers have their own solutions for collecting and managing logs, with proprietary implementations and custom libraries.
While using the libraries is generally simple, testing them proved to be much harder.
Testing software integrations with major cloud providers usually requires accounts for each service, along with significant costs if they’re part of a CI/CD pipeline that runs regularly to ensure no breaking changes are introduced to the project.
The first integration we implemented was for the AWS CloudWatch service.
While searching for local cloud emulators, floci stood out as the most professional-looking solution.
Using floci couldn't be simpler. All that was required was a single Docker command, and you can have a local version of many AWS services.
Configuring the go aws-sdk-go-v2 library to use a local endpoint is even easier: just pass a simple url string to the configuration struct, and you're using a local floci instance.
We could create log groups and streams with the official AWS CLI tool or Python library and see forwarded logs working as expected in no time.
Full of hope after the AWS success story, we expected that adding Google Cloud Logging would be just as simple.
There were a few solutions we found after a bit of research that looked very similar to what floci provided for AWS, but after trying all of them, none of the solutions actually worked.
Some didn't even have functional download links, or the instructions provided were completely wrong.