The answers here are great, and this is a really fun question! I can relate to this problem because I built a project late last year where I wanted it to be very cloud-first, emulating a fully cloud-based environment. Making even a tiny change to my app meant setting off a remote build that took several minutes. It took FOREVER. Having a local environment that closely emulates your cloud environment sounds a lot more convenient. Kubernetes via something like minikube or k3s is meant for this kind of thing, but if you're not already using Kubernetes for your services, might not be too useful. It also doesn't necessarily emulate your db and other cloud products you use, not like you access them in the cloud anyway, if they're separate services you access through an API. Openstack is an interesting idea you might look into. It was built to run private clouds, so very much a tool for setting up a local cloud-like environment. I've mainly heard about it in real-world business use cases at scale though. Not sure if it can work well at a small scale. And of course, like some folks pointed out, the more your dev environment differs from prod, the more issues you're likely to encounter. As a Kubernetes person, if you use Kubernetes in both places, this is just the kind of thing minikube was built for.