I'm looking to build an application off Amazon cloud search and dynamo DB and I don't want to waste money or free tier during application development. So, I'm wondering if Amazon Dynamo DB and cloud search can somehow be simulated on your local machine during the development period? If not, what is the best alternative to create a stub? I'm considering Apache Cassandra and Solr. Any other alternatives for low cost development?
Also, I'm developing on Windows so, I'd like to know if there is a good windows alternative to Cassandra, that'll save me the complexity of running Cassandra over a VM. An open source database that could be embedded in Java would be ideal.
I've been using ddbmock, which is a Python library, with quite a lot of success. It has support for most of the features of a live DynamoDB instance, and even supports some of the error messages (although the messages might not match 100%).
There are some others out there too: Alternator written in Java, and clientside_aws written in Ruby.