In this guide we teach you about strategies for testing your serverless applications. We point you to code samples that illustrate a variety of techniques in different programming languages. Finally, we outline the benefits and drawbacks of these techniques and provide opinionated guidance about them.

Many developers are used to writing applications that are deployed and tested entirely on a local desktop environment. During development, they usually run these applications on a desktop operating system or in a local container-based environment.

Serverless applications are different.

When you build serverless applications, fundamental architecture components may not be deployable to a desktop environment but will exist only in the cloud. You may create desktop conditions that resemble your cloud environment, but you can never deploy cloud services to your local environment. Writing for services that only exist remotely requires a shift in your development and testing strategy.