Local development and testing

One challenge we face as serverless engineers is that of convenience. To be more specific, it's a swift process writing code, deploying it, and beginning testing. Testing a live system will often result in some code or configuration issue, but it is quickly fixed and redeployed. The problem we face, therefore, is that it's so easy to fix issues and then redeploy that we can get into the habit of skipping testing or not running our stack locally.

Local development

One question I answer with some regularity is, How do I run this locally? When writing a server-based application, one of the first tasks to undertake is getting the system set up so that it can be run during development. When building a serverless-based application, however, there really is no server to run. So, how do we develop our application?

The truthful answer is that this is a challenge, and one that has not been solved perfectly yet; to be fair, this issue is difficult with any microservice-based...