If you read the 1.2.0 post, that is where this picks up. It has been about four weeks since then and 30 patch releases. This is a tour of what actually shipped, focused on the parts you can use today.

If you have not seen MiniStack before: it is a single-binary local AWS emulator. One process, 46 services, MIT licensed, runs on your laptop or in CI in under a second. Think LocalStack without the paywall and without the JVM.

GitHub: https://github.com/ministackorg/ministack
Docs: https://ministack.dev/docs/

New services

EKS with real k3s (1.2.20). CreateCluster spawns a 75 MB k3s container that gives you a real Kubernetes API. kubectl, Helm, anything K8s-shaped works out of the box. CloudFormation provisioners for AWS::EKS::Cluster and AWS::EKS::Nodegroup are wired in. If Docker is unavailable the cluster still goes ACTIVE with a stub endpoint so the API contract holds in CI.

Transfer Family (1.2.17). 10 operations covering server CRUD, user CRUD, SSH key rotation, and LOGICAL home directory mappings to S3. Contributed by @mjdavidson.

EventBridge Scheduler (1.2.19). The full scheduler API: schedule groups, cascading deletes, name and state filters, plus at(), cron(), and rate() expressions. CFN AWS::Scheduler::Schedule and AWS::Scheduler::ScheduleGroup provisioners included. EventBridge cron() rules also fire automatically now (1.3.25), with a zero-dependency parser that covers the full six-field syntax including L, LW, <n>W, <n>#<k>.

Resource Groups Tagging API (1.2.21, 1.3.2). GetResources, GetTagKeys, GetTagValues across 15 services (S3, Lambda, SQS, SNS, DynamoDB, EventBridge, KMS, ECR, ECS, Glue, Cognito, AppSync, Scheduler, CloudFront, EFS). Contributed by @AdigaAkhil.

Resource Groups (1.3.27). 19 of 23 spec operations: group CRUD, resource queries, configuration, membership, tagging, account settings. Requested by @staranto.

AWS CloudTrail (1.3.27). In-memory audit log with control plane and LookupEvents. Per-account ring buffer, opt-in via CLOUDTRAIL_RECORDING=1. Contributed by @AdigaAkhil.

AppSync Events API (1.3.25). Event API management, channel namespaces, API keys, HTTP publish, and realtime WebSocket on the aws-appsync-event-ws subprotocol. Contributed by @marcin-nowak-scl.

CloudFront KeyValueStore (1.3.25, 1.3.26). Both planes: management plane for Create/Describe/List/Update/Delete with ETag concurrency, and a separate cloudfront-keyvaluestore data plane for GetKey/PutKey/DeleteKey/UpdateKeys. CFN AWS::CloudFront::KeyValueStore provisioner included. Contributed by @davireisvieira.

Lambda

This was a big stretch.

RIE-based Docker executor (1.2.20). LAMBDA_EXECUTOR=docker now uses official AWS Lambda Runtime Interface Emulator images for every runtime. Containers stay warm between invocations. The original work was contributed by @fzonneveld.

Java, .NET, Ruby runtime support (1.2.21). java21, java17, java11, java8.al2, dotnet8, dotnet6, ruby3.4, ruby3.3, ruby3.2. Plus nodejs22.x, nodejs24.x, python3.14, java25, dotnet10 along the way.

Lambda to CloudWatch Logs (1.3.3). Every invocation now writes START, handler output, END, and REPORT lines to /aws/lambda/{FunctionName} on a per-invocation stream. Metric filters, subscription filters, and alarm chains that needed real Lambda logs work locally now. Applies to every executor.

Async retry and DLQ routing (1.3.3). Invoke(InvocationType=Event) and every internal event-source fan-out (S3 notifications today) retry up to MaximumRetryAttempts and route the final failure to the configured DLQ or OnFailure destination (SQS, SNS, or another Lambda) with the AWS-shaped envelope.

Docker-in-Docker (1.2.21). Running MiniStack inside Docker with LAMBDA_EXECUTOR=docker works. Code is copied via docker cp instead of bind-mounted, and Lambda containers are reached via container IP. Reported by @HackJack-101.

Filter criteria during polling (1.3.3). SQS, Kinesis, and DynamoDB Streams pollers evaluate each record against FilterCriteria.Filters and drop non-matching records before invoking. Equality lists, prefix, suffix, anything-but, exists, and numeric content filters are all supported.

Step Functions aws-sdk:* integrations

Resource: arn:aws:states:::aws-sdk:<service>:<op> works for the protocols below in 1.3.30:

• query (EC2, SQS, SNS, IAM, STS, ELB, Autoscaling, RDS, ElastiCache, Redshift, CloudFront)
• json (DynamoDB, Kinesis, Lambda, KMS, Secrets Manager, EventBridge, SSM, Cognito, Glue, Athena, ECS, ECR, EKS, CloudWatch Logs, StepFunctions, Scheduler)
• rest-json (API Gateway, AppSync, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, EFS, MediaConvert, MediaLive, MWAA, OpenSearch, Pinpoint, RDS Data, S3 Files, SageMaker, Transfer)
• rest-xml (S3, in 1.3.29: ListBuckets, CreateBucket, DeleteBucket, HeadBucket, GetBucketVersioning, ListObjectsV2, ListObjects, HeadObject, CopyObject, DeleteObject, GetObjectTagging, PutObjectTagging)

REST-JSON output now uses PascalCase to match the query and REST-XML dispatchers (1.3.30, contributed by @jayjanssen), so ResultSelector: $.Records works on aws-sdk:rdsdata:executeStatement results.

CloudFormation

New provisioners since 1.2.0:

• AWS::Events::EventBus (1.2.21)
• AWS::Pipes::Pipe (1.3.2, contributed by @davidtme), with FilterPolicy and FilterPolicyScope on AWS::SNS::Subscription
• AWS::Scheduler::Schedule, AWS::Scheduler::ScheduleGroup (1.2.19)
• AWS::CodeBuild::Project (1.2.19)
• AWS::EKS::Cluster, AWS::EKS::Nodegroup (1.2.20)
• AWS::CloudFront::KeyValueStore (1.3.26), with the engine now routing previously-provisioned resources through a per-type update handler when one is defined

Infrastructure

Hypercorn ASGI with HTTP/2 h2c (1.3.1). Replaces uvicorn. AWS Java SDK v2 and the Kinesis Client Library work out of the box. Idle RAM dropped from about 21 MB to about 7 MB. Contributed by @AdigaAkhil.

Lazy service imports (1.2.19). Service modules load on first request. Idle RAM dropped from 59 MB to 21 MB before the hypercorn cut, startup time from 1.2 s to 0.5 s. Services you never call cost zero memory.

Per-PR preview Docker images (1.3.2). Every PR (including forks) publishes ministackorg/ministack-preview-build:pr-N-<shortsha>. Reviewers can docker pull the exact build before merge. Contributed by @jgrumboe.

Multi-tenancy correctness

1.3.3 closed eight cross-account leaks where services stored per-tenant data in plain dict or list (CloudWatch metrics, ElastiCache events, EventBridge buses, Athena workgroups, SES sent emails, API Gateway v1 stages and deployments). All of them now route through AccountScopedDict, with isolation tests in tests/test_multitenancy.py.

If you set AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID differently per test (or per Lambda function) you get genuine isolation. Lambda multi-account isolation in particular landed in PR #576 (worker pool keyed by account, ARN-derived credentials in the four spawn paths).

Wire-format fixes worth knowing

• All timestamps in JSON responses are int epoch seconds. The Java SDK v2 rejects floats. STS Credentials.Expiration, EventBridge Time, EKS createdAt, Backup, Firehose, CloudTrail timestamps were converted across 1.3.x.
• KMS Verify raises KMSInvalidSignatureException on bad signatures instead of returning SignatureValid: false.
• KMS crypto operations return the full key ARN as KeyId, not the bare UUID.
• DynamoDB ConditionalCheckFailedException populates Item when ReturnValuesOnConditionCheckFailure="ALL_OLD" is set, on Put/Update/Delete/TransactWriteItems.
• EC2 VPCs include cidrBlockAssociationSet (Terraform AWS provider v6 crashes without it).
• SQS FIFO DeduplicationScope: messageGroup actually scopes per message group.
• SQS ReceiveMessage honours MessageSystemAttributeNames. AWS SDK v2 was the only thing reading it (1.3.29, contributed by @joaomena).

Get it

docker run --rm -p 4566:4566 ministackorg/ministack:1.3.30

Or pip:

pip install ministack
ministack

GitHub: https://github.com/ministackorg/ministack
Docs: https://ministack.dev/docs/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ministackorg
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ministack/

If something you need is missing or wrong, open an issue. Most of what is listed above started as one.