Not a full solution, but when I was doing this I really got to love the awslogs utility: https://github.com/jorgebastida/awslogs https://github.com/jorgebastid

Not a full solution, but when I was doing this I really got to love the awslogs utility: https://github.com/jorgebastida/awslogs https://github.com/jorgebastida/awslogs It allows you to stream Cloudwatch logs from the command line, so you can grep them, save them to files, etc... (The web based Cloudwatch interface is terrible.) Another suggestion is to try to modularize the core business logic in your lambda such that you separate the lambda-centric stuff from the rest of it. Obviously, though, if "the rest of it" is hitting other AWS services, you're going to hit the same testing roadblock. Or you can try mocking, which may or may not provide much value for you. There's a python library for that, (moto), but it's not 100% up to date wrt AWS services/interfaces, last I had checked. Might be worth a try though. https://github.com/spulec/moto https://github.com/spulec/moto