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Do you need to keep them running constantly? The beauty of platforms like AWS, GCP, ... is that provisioning capacity is just an API call away - so could you not have some way of provisioning those resources on demand to run the necessary tests?

(If you can't get internet on your plane then you might not be able to run tests, but that's the case with the full test suite on a fair few systems anyway)

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The services are incredibly useful, incredibly powerful, but from a code + dev hygiene perspective it's safer to be able to completely test your code in isolation prior to deployment.

Many people are saying: "Just mock the AWS parts..." or "Provision from amazon on demand...", but there should be "common" mocks, or ideally "toy mocks" which can be used locally in order to verify the production system works how you expect it to, prior to deployment to that production system.

Basically, I'm uncomfortable making AWS a hard-dependency if I can't get something like it running locally for a "100 record use case"

It would be nice if AWS provided mocks but the reality is that's there is more than one lib for creating stubs and mocks for every language. Additionally, I would assume that AWS want's to steer clear of making those types of decisions for the developer. The "what lib do I use for x" decisions that developers have to make.

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