Is that what people do is test/develop primarily with local mocks of the services? I assumed it was more like you deploy mini copies of the app to individual instances namespaced to developer or feature branch, so everyone is working on something that actually fairly closely approximates prod just without the loading characteristics and btw you have to be online so no working on an airplane.
There are many paths. Worst case, I've witnessed developers editing Lambda code in the AWS console because they had no way to recreate the environment locally.
If you can't run locally, productivity drops like a rock. Each "cloud deploy" wastes tons of time.
SST has the best dev experience but requires you be online. They deploy all the real services (namespaced to you) and then instead of your function code they deploy little proxy lambdas that pass the request/response down to your local machine.
It’s still not perfect because the code is running locally but it allows “instant” updates after you make local changes and it’s the best I’ve found.
Mocks usually don’t line up with how things run in prod. Most teams just make small branch or dev environments, or test in staging. Once you hit odd bugs, serverless stops feeling simple and just turns into a headache.
Yeah, I’ve never worked at one of those shops but it’s always sounded like a nightmare. I get very anxious when I don’t have a local representative environment where I can get detailed logs, attach a debugger, run strace, whatever.