I was completely lost with AWS lambda until I discovered
https://serverless.com - the fact that you haven't found them yourself suggests they need to do a much better job of marketing themselves!
I run my lambdas locally with a single command: serverless offline
If the lambda has an http endpoint, it creates the endpoint at localhost/<endpoint> and I'm good to go, it even does live reloading as I edit my code.
If the lambda runs off AWS events, I can invoke the lambda locally with a command, and point it to a JSON file of a simulated AWS event. I get my local rails app to create these AWS event JSON files, so that I can test end to end locally. Works well for my purposes.
To deploy I just run: serverless deploy --stage production
Which sets up all the necessary additional services like API Gateway, cloudwatch etc.
I can't imagine using AWS lambda any other way.
I run my lambdas locally with a single command: serverless offline
If the lambda has an http endpoint, it creates the endpoint at localhost/<endpoint> and I'm good to go, it even does live reloading as I edit my code.
If the lambda runs off AWS events, I can invoke the lambda locally with a command, and point it to a JSON file of a simulated AWS event. I get my local rails app to create these AWS event JSON files, so that I can test end to end locally. Works well for my purposes.
To deploy I just run: serverless deploy --stage production
Which sets up all the necessary additional services like API Gateway, cloudwatch etc.
I can't imagine using AWS lambda any other way.