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AWS Bites

89. Should you simulate AWS locally?

Welcome to the epic tale of AWS Bites! In this chapter, we embark on a perilous journey through the challenges of developing distributed applications on AWS. We encounter fierce foes in the form of deployment times and limited access to real AWS services during local development. But fear not, for we have powerful tools at our disposal, including the legendary LocalStack and Serverless offline. And if that's not enough, we have tips and tricks for optimizing our development flow without local simulations, using well-structured code and unit tests. We even share CloudFormation tricks to speed up deployment times and reveal the secret of speeding up the development of IAM policies with Session Policies. So grab your swords and join us on this epic adventure to overcome the challenges of local development on AWS! 💰 SPONSORS 💰 fourTheorem is the company that makes AWS Bites possible. If you are looking for a partner to accompany you on your cloud journey, check them out at fourtheorem.com!


In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

  • Localstack coverage: https://docs.localstack.cloud/user-guide/aws/feature-coverage/
  • Localstack v2.0: https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/04/localstack-aws-version-two-ga/
  • Cargo-Lambda: https://www.cargo-lambda.info/
  • AWS .NET Mock Lambda Test Tool - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/debugging-net-core-aws-lambda-functions-using-the-aws-net-mock-lambda-test-tool/
  • Step Functions Local - local Step Function simulation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/step-functions/latest/dg/sfn-local.html
  • Article by Yan Cui on the topic of testing serverless applications: https://theburningmonk.com/2022/05/my-testing-strategy-for-serverless-applications/


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