Couldn’t agree more, the dev experience was awful. You basically have to develop against public AWS services, my dev machine became a glorified terminal. They do seem to be iterating on the tooling quickly, but I wouldn’t use it again if I had a choice.
Edit: CloudFormation was also painful for me, the docs were sparse and there were very few examples that helped me out.
SAM templates are a subset of CloudFormation templates; that PDF could be three times as long and still not have the content I needed.
Yes there are examples, but there wasn’t one at the time that mapped to what I was trying to accomplish. Because, again, SAM templates are not one-for-one CloudFormation templates.
I found the community around SAM to be very limited. One of the many reasons I’ve moved to the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Edit: CloudFormation was also painful for me, the docs were sparse and there were very few examples that helped me out.