Previously, you were limited to the AWS Toolkits for Eclipse and Visual Studio if you wanted to perform local testing for your Lambda functions. Now, you can use SAM Local with the IDE of your choice to locally test and debug your AWS SAM-defined Lambda functions. The SAM Local Event Payload Generator enables you to simulate event triggers for your Lambda functions. SAM Local also lets you make local API calls to invoke functions that are fronted by Amazon API Gateway. After SAM Local executes your Lambda functions, you can view the responses and logs on your local machine. SAM Local leverages the docker-lambda Docker images to run your code in a sandbox that simulates the Lambda execution environment.