In the end, what we did in our team was provision a development environment for every developer in AWS. In my opinion, this may not be the best solution, but attempting to replicate a working environment locally is almost impossible. The good news is that the cost of Lambda is not a significant issue for medium-sized projects.
David Krasovskij
Software Developer
Great article. One of the pain points I have encountered is local environment setup. In case your Lambda starts to get a bit smarter and you want to test the behavior of your new code before deployment, there is no really great way to do it. You can run some tests on it, but you wouldnt be able to get something that you can get with typical serviceses - run install and check :)