Well, for the time being I'm really just burning AWS credits. But you're right! I do however like that my dev machine is the exact same instance type in the sam

Well, for the time being I'm really just burning AWS credits. But you're right! I do however like that my dev machine is the exact same instance type in the same AWS region as my production instances. If I built an equivalent machine it would have different performance characteristics. Often times the AWS VMs have weird behavior that I would otherwise be caught off guard with when deploying to the cloud for the first time.