I am looking to dive into a project using AppSync. So far I have been able to find plenty of articles and such online giving all the steps as to what buttons to click in order to get a sample project running, but none of them seem to touch on how one deals with it from a local development or in a CI/CD environment. Its probably my "old school" idea of how dev usually works, but I was expecting some way to simulate enough of the environment locally to do development and run unit tests, but I can't seem to find any way to do just that. And when I get to the UI portion I have no idea how to have a local dev instance of the backend to run against.
Do people not develop in this way anymore, opting to instead stand up a "development stack"? I just want to make sure I am not painting myself into a corner in the future.