vera

Vera: True Simulation of Any Cloud

💻 A high-fidelity, multi-cloud emulator that runs entirely on your laptop.

🛠️ Build and test cloud infrastructure locally — no cloud accounts, no billing, no risk.

☁️ Full API coverage: Amazon EC2 (89 resources) and GCP Compute (91 resources).

The world's first anycloud emulator

Why Vera?

Cloud infrastructure is expensive to experiment with. Even a quick test — spinning up a virtual machine, creating a network, attaching a disk — means provisioning real resources, waiting on remote APIs, and paying for what you use. Mistakes cost money and time, especially in a shared environment.

Vera runs the cloud on your laptop. It mimics the APIs of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform locally, so your tools: CLI, Terraform, Python SDKs behave exactly as they would against the real thing, except everything happens on your machine in milliseconds, with no credentials, no cost, no safety concerns, and no cleanup required.

🆓 No account needed. Vera ships a local DevOps environment. You never authenticate against a real cloud provider, which means there’s nothing to sign up for, nothing to configure, and no risk of accidentally hitting production.

⚡ Instant feedback. Because requests never leave your machine, operations that would take seconds or minutes against a real cloud complete instantly. Iterating on infrastructure code becomes as fast as iterating on any other code.

🔌 CLI/SDK/IaC. Vera doesn’t require you to change how you write infrastructure. Standard AWS CLI commands, standard gcloud commands, standard Terraform configurations — all of them work against Vera without modification.

🛡️ Safe operations. There’s no way to accidentally destroy a real resource or incur a surprise bill. Every resource lives in memory and disappears when you stop the emulator.

🌍 Full API coverage. Vera covers 89 AWS EC2 resource types and 91 GCP Compute resource types — VPCs, instances, disks, firewalls, load balancers, routing, snapshots, and much more. It handles the full lifecycle of the resources developers actually use day to day.

☁️ Anycloud. Vera’s key innovation is a program synthesis pipeline using neurosymbolic AI that works for any cloud. Perfect fit for modern, multi-cloud deployments.

Vera Architecture

Quick Start

Docker

docker compose up -d
source ./vera-env.sh # for Linux or MacOS
. .\vera-env.ps1 # for Windows

aws ec2 create-vpc --cidr-block 10.0.0.0/16
gcloud compute instances list --project=vera-project

vera-env.sh configures your terminal to route standard CLI commands to the local emulators. Re-run it in each new terminal session.

To start only one cloud:

docker compose up -d vera-aws  # AWS only
docker compose up -d vera-gcp  # GCP only

Local setup

Each emulator lives in its own directory under emulators/. Setup is a single command:

# AWS
cd emulators/aws-ec2
./install.sh

# GCP
cd emulators/google-compute
./install.sh

Then start the emulator and test it in another terminal:

# terminal 1
cd emulators/aws-ec2
uv run main.py

# terminal 2
cd emulators/aws-ec2
uv run awscli ec2 create-vpc --cidr-block 10.0.0.0/16

See the individual READMEs for usage examples, test suites, and the full list of supported resources.

Vera Emulators

Vera-AWS

Emulates the Amazon EC2 API with support for 89 resource types. Drop-in wrappers for the AWS CLI (awscli) and Terraform (terlocal) are included, so you can run your existing commands and configurations unchanged.

In head-to-head testing against 260 real AWS CLI commands, Vera AWS passes 80% — compared to 47% for LocalStack.

→ Vera AWS documentation

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Vera-GCP

Emulates the Google Cloud Compute API with support for 91 resource types. A drop-in wrapper for the gcloud CLI (gcpcli) handles credential isolation automatically, so gcloud compute commands route to the local emulator with no real Google account required. The Google Cloud Compute Python SDK is also supported.

Seeded resources (a default network, common zones, machine types, and image families) are available immediately on startup with no setup needed.

→ Vera GCP documentation

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Citation

If you use Vera in your research, please cite:

@misc{bhatnagar2026automatedsynthesiscloudemulators,
      title={Automated Synthesis of Cloud Emulators}, 
      author={Archit Bhatnagar and Zhenning Yang and Sarah McClure and Yiming Qiu and Sylvia Ratnasamy and Ang Chen},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2608.23842},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.SE},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23842}, 
}