Checking the validity of an STS token requires that you have a bona fide token first. Thus it’s not a “digital twin”; it is the real McCoy. And STS tokens are free.
There is no digital twin I’m aware of that is capable of simulating the real behavior of an EC2 instance. There are just too many variables to consider. To test instance launch and runtime behavior to a meaningful degree of certainty, you have to launch one first. And that means accepting the costs of doing that.
(I notice, too, that you appear to be executing the AWS CLI to do this. I’m not sure if that’s bad or not, but it smells a little fishy.)
We're being intentionally pragmatic here. If you're building a digital twin of, say, an F1 car - the complexity of the simulator has to be very high. It's more like building a mock of physics than just the car.
With Infrasturcture, it turns out that what you need to know is "did I make a valid configuration", or "does this set of things work together". It's less about making a mock of the results, and more about simulating that the results would have the effect you think they will. So we can't tell you "will your application work on this size of instance" (although if you know that, you could encode that!) - but we can tell you if the options your setting are correct, if the AMI exists in the region, etc etc.
It’s terribly slow, given that it’s starting an entire Python process, configuring boto3, etc. that’s 2 seconds on my machine, just to run —help. And it’s all to make a single HTTP request (80ms)
There is no digital twin I’m aware of that is capable of simulating the real behavior of an EC2 instance. There are just too many variables to consider. To test instance launch and runtime behavior to a meaningful degree of certainty, you have to launch one first. And that means accepting the costs of doing that.
(I notice, too, that you appear to be executing the AWS CLI to do this. I’m not sure if that’s bad or not, but it smells a little fishy.)