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 providers solve this problem?

Thanks for any help.