Edit: Here's some more conversations I found on the topic of the terrible workflow for cloud dev if anyone is interested https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855037
Unfortunately we have a full Javascript stack at my company, but I'll keep an eye on this in case anybody adds more dev environments!
I’m not an MS fanboy by any stretch but VS Code, Azure Functions, and even local storage emulation with Azurite is pretty slick.
First time I played with it my background was very far from anything in this space (literally first time I used node) and I had a completely locally developed toy function with storage up and running in maybe 30 minutes. Then in a few clicks it was deployed and running in Azure.
All in less time than it took for me to wander through the AWS docs and console to even figure out which product to use.
But honestly, all a Lambda is a script with a function that takes two parameters - an event and a context. You can scaffold testing and development just like you would a controller action in an MVC framework - use a test harness that calls the method with the correct JSON payload and usually a null event context.