I'm quite interested in beginning some development using Amazon SQS, perhaps SimpleDB too, my question is this, are there any open source solutions that mimic the functionality, just for the purposes of development. I've already encountered the Eucalyptus project (http://open.eucalyptus.com) for creating an EC-esque cloud.
I've not had any success with google, I suspect it's because the cost of entry is so inexpensive, but still, does anyone know of anything like this?
Hi. Some of the Amazon SDKs have "mock" mode, which is:
The mock service is an alternate way to use the sample code. The service doesn't call AWS, but instead returns a set response that you can modify to suit your needs (the XML response files are in the Mock directory). The mock service makes it easy for you to test how your application handles different responses.
For SQS, it appears the Java, Perl, and PHP sdks have mock mode. I know that the .NET SDK for Amazon RDS also has the mock mode. If the sdk you will be using doesnt have the mock mode available, you could probably create your own similar type of thing which returns the preconfigured responses instead of actually hitting up the service.
See here for more info
If you are in .NET or Mono you can try Stratosphere. It has local implementations that mimic SimpleDB, SQS and S3. For SimpleDB mock implementation it uses SQLite, for SQS and S3 it stores messages/objects in file system.