Developing Serverless Applications Locally with the “serverless-cloudside-plugin”

Developing and testing serverless applications locally can be a challenge. Even with tools like SAM and the Serverless Framework, you often end up mocking your cloud resources, or resorting to tricks (like using pseudo-variables) to build ARNs and service endpoint URLs manually. While these workarounds may have the desired result, they also complicate our configuration files with (potentially brittle) user-constructed strings, which duplicates information already available to CloudFormation.

This is a common problem for me and other serverless developers I know. So I decided to come up with a solution.

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Solve Your Own Problem…And You Have At Least One Customer

Last week I was deploying an app to AWS Lambda using Serverless and I accidentally misspelled a stage name. This resulted in deploying an entire CloudFormation stack with the wrong name, which wasted time and resources. I immediately realized that I spelled it wrong, so I was able to undeploy the stack quickly. I fully admit that misspelling the name was my fault, but since Serverless can deploy complex CloudFormation stacks that provision users, databases, SNS topics, etc., it seemed like there should be a better way to avoid this simple mistake.

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