The Latin word is "flocci", which means hairs of wool, and it was also used to denote an insignificant thing.
English normally preserves the double consonants of Latin, and in this case it has already done this in the English words derived from "floccus", e.g. "to flocculate" and "flocculent".
In clouds, it was used due to the resemblance of those clouds with curly sheep wool.
Many users, (myself included), had need to test cloud stuff locally, but had no tool to do so. Localstack exists, but it started rug pulling the free tier and they didn’t support all the features.
Meanwhile, Floci makes it easy to write your own cloud compatible test suite, then implement the feature to match. I was able to get a good enough coverage on a few features created in a weekend on the $20 tier of Claude to make it useful to me, then others picked up the work to round it out.
It’s really cool to see it grow.
I’ve definitely reached for these local cloud tools from time to time, but in a well-architected piece of software, you aren’t getting that much value from them. Either you don’t have a hard cloud dependency, or you want a high fidelity test of a specific cloud dependency.
I’m interested in something that would allow me to over time migrante away from a GCP project that uses many services today - e.g., Datastore, FileStorage etc.
For us, floci-oci for object storage looks interesting. For everything else we have our own stack.