Amazon Web Services (AWS) said on Nov. 11 that it released an open-source tool called “AWS Emulator” that reproduces hundreds of its cloud services on a developer’s PC.

AWS Emulator is free software that helps developers validate code on their own computers without accessing the cloud. Matt Goldberg (맷 골드버그), an AWS senior principal engineer, said in a blog that he used AI agents to design and write the entire service. No human engineers wrote or reviewed a single line of code.

As AI coding agents such as AWS Kiro and Claude Code pour out code, teams responsible for validation are facing bottlenecks. Code produced by AI must be validated on real cloud infrastructure. Latency and cost make it difficult to validate on AWS cloud every time.

Existing third-party emulators support only some AWS services, and when AWS changes a service, emulators can operate differently from the actual service, the company explained.

Goldberg used the Smithy API model that AWS has released as the blueprint. He judged whether results produced by agents were correct by comparing them with actual AWS services. He said that when he instructed AWS Kiro to recreate Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Kiro produced a working replica in 15 minutes.

AWS developed the emulator in the Rust language. It released the code under a CC0 public domain license and also provided commit history and a list of known discrepancies.

Swami Sivasubramanian (스와미 시바수브라마니안), AWS vice president for agentic AI and new technologies, said of AWS Emulator, "It shows how the role of a software engineer is changing," adding, "As AI agents take on writing, testing and debugging code, humans are becoming 'system orchestrators' who set boundaries and design test specifications and guardrails."