Testing SQS Messages with Lambda Invocation CloudWatch Logs

A really great use case for Lambda is to have it connected to an SQS Queue to process messages that come in. For instance, you might have an api that users get registered on. Instead of immediately sending out a welcome email, you might place a message on an SQS Queue to send out emails. This helps in terms of being able to more easily batch processes, and also takes away code complexity of the API.

Testing out this process has been quite cumbersome however. Developers have had to write unit tests for their Lambda's, but actually putting messages onto the queue, and then viewing the resulting logs from CloudWatch, required a lot of fumbling around in the AWS Console.