Running the AWS CLI Against Your Own Hardware

Description and use

Spinifex lets you run the AWS CLI against local hardware by redirecting to a local endpoint, preserving existing tooling and scripts in air‑gapped or secure environments.

Problem

Engineers in air‑gapped or secure environments cannot use the AWS CLI because it assumes connectivity to amazonaws.com, forcing a separate toolchain for on‑prem deployments.

Outcome

By redirecting the AWS CLI to a Spinifex endpoint, teams can run all existing cloud tooling against on‑prem hardware without changing scripts, enabling air‑gapped, secure, or data‑sovereignty deployments at lower cost.

Workflow

• Install Spinifex on local hardware
• Run spx admin init to create a profile pointing to the Spinifex endpoint
• Configure AWS CLI to use the new profile or use --endpoint-url for single commands
• Execute existing AWS CLI commands (e.g., aws ec2 describe-instances) against the local endpoint
• Use Terraform or eksctl with the same configuration, now targeting Spinifex

Evidence

The AWS CLI doesn’t know or care whether it’s talking to AWS or Spinifex, and redirecting it is a single profile entry

Source

Spinifex runs real EC2 compute on your hardware, real EBS volumes with genuine persistence guarantees, real S3‑compatible object storage, and real EKS clusters

Source