One of the biggest hurdles for anyone learning AWS is the sign-up wall: you need a credit card, and one misconfigured resource can leave you with a surprise bill. The good news is you can practice AWS hands-on without creating an account at all. This is ideal for beginners who just want to learn — but it is not recommended for production.

The trick is to emulate an AWS environment locally using a tool called LocalStack. The steps are as follows.

Run LocalStack with Docker:

docker run --rm -it -p 4566:4566 -p 4510-4559:4510-4559 localstack/localstack

Install the AWS CLI and run the configure command, entering the values below:

aws configure

AWS Access Key ID: test
AWS Secret Access Key: test
Default region name: us-east-1
Default output format [None]

Finally, when running an AWS command, add the --endpoint-url option:

aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4566

For example, create an S3 bucket:

aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4566 s3api create-bucket --bucket localstack

{
  "Location": "/localstack"
}

If you’d like a UI, follow the guide here: Resource Browser. It still has some limitations, but it’s a very handy tool if you need to practice AWS without being able to create an account. LocalStack can emulate more than 60 AWS services — plenty to practice with.