Ask HN: Does anyone else find the AWS Lambda developer experience frustrating?

📰 Hacker News · tdfirth

Improve your AWS Lambda development experience by leveraging local testing tools and frameworks to reduce the slow feedback loop of deploying and testing code in the cloud.

intermediate Published 18 Apr 2021
Action Steps
  1. Use LocalStack to run AWS Lambda functions locally and test them with simulated events
  2. Explore AWS SAM CLI for local testing and debugging of Lambda functions
  3. Implement Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) style tests for Lambda functions using frameworks like Pytest or Unittest
  4. Configure CloudWatch logs to stream to a local logging solution for easier debugging
  5. Use AWS Lambda's built-in support for local testing with Docker containers
Who Needs to Know This

Developers working with AWS Lambda can benefit from this knowledge to streamline their development process and improve productivity. Team leads and managers can also use this information to inform their technology stack and tooling decisions.

Key Insight

💡 Local testing and debugging tools can significantly improve the AWS Lambda development experience by reducing the need for slow and manual cloud-based testing.

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🚀 Speed up your #AWSLambda development with local testing tools like LocalStack and SAM CLI! 🚀

Full Article

Hey HN, I've been using AWS lambda a bit recently, mostly as a way to glue together various bits and pieces. Maybe I'm doing this wrong but does anyone else find the experience to be really frustrating? I can unit test bits of the code just fine, but at some point I always end up stuck in a slow feedback loop where I deploy the code, do some manual invoking, go and dig through the logs in CloudWatch, add another print statement in my lambda... and so on. What I want is to run the lambdas locally, ideally more than one, and then exercise them with streams of test events (perhaps captured from a real environment). It would be quite cool if I could define BDD style tests around them too. Anyone have any suggestions or share my frustrations? I have heard localstack is quite good although I haven't given it a go yet. Would that work for me? I did try SAM but I was a bit underwhelmed and I don't want to use a separate IaC tool for these. Alternatively, do other FaaS provi
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