AWS Emulator is a local emulator of the AWS APIs. You use it to test your software without calling AWS, on your own machine, on a development server, or in continuous integration (CI). You don’t need an AWS account. Your requests go to the emulator, not to AWS. So you work with emulated resources instead of AWS resources. AWS Emulator has no additional service fee. You pay only for AWS resources when you deploy on AWS.
The emulator is a local program that serves an AWS API endpoint. It has no graphical interface. After you start the emulator, you set environment variables to point the AWS CLI or an AWS SDK at its endpoint. Then you run your code as usual. In embedded mode, you pass the emulator’s HTTP client to your SDK instead.
