1. If you are building APIs and using Lambda functions as targets from an API Gateway API, look into libraries like serverless-wsgi (Python) or wai-handler-hal (Haskell) that translate between API Gateway request/response payloads and some kind of ecosystem-native representation. Then as long as you're writing code where all state gets persisted outside of the request/response cycle, you can develop locally as if you were writing for a more normal deploy environment.
2. Look into the lambda runtime interface emulator ( https://github.com/aws/aws-lambda-runtime-interface-emulator... ). This lets you send invoke requests to a fake listener and locally test the lambda more easily. While the emulator is provided in the AWS container base images, you don't need to run it inside a container if you're deploying with zip files. (AWS-provided container images automatically enable the emulator if not running in a lambda runtime environment, and using docker for port remapping, which is nice but not at all required.)
3. Get really good at capturing all requests to external services, and mocking them out for local testing. Whether this is done with free monads, effect systems, or by routing everything through gateway classes will depend on your language and library choices.
1. If you are building APIs and using Lambda functions as targets from an API Gateway API, look into libraries like serverless-wsgi (Python) or wai-handler-hal (Haskell) that translate between API Gateway request/response payloads and some kind of ecosystem-native representation. Then as long as you're writing code where all state gets persisted outside of the request/response cycle, you can develop locally as if you were writing for a more normal deploy environment.
2. Look into the lambda runtime interface emulator ( https://github.com/aws/aws-lambda-runtime-interface-emulator... ). This lets you send invoke requests to a fake listener and locally test the lambda more easily. While the emulator is provided in the AWS container base images, you don't need to run it inside a container if you're deploying with zip files. (AWS-provided container images automatically enable the emulator if not running in a lambda runtime environment, and using docker for port remapping, which is nice but not at all required.)
3. Get really good at capturing all requests to external services, and mocking them out for local testing. Whether this is done with free monads, effect systems, or by routing everything through gateway classes will depend on your language and library choices.