Building a Serverless TODO API with AWS SAM, Lambda, DynamoDB and LocalStack

When I started learning serverless, my biggest fear wasn't the technology, it was the AWS bill. As a self-taught Cloud and DevOps Engineer still building my skills, I needed a way to practice real AWS serverless architecture without watching my account balance drop every time I deployed something. The solution? LocalStack, a tool that runs AWS services locally on your machine using Docker. Completely free. Completely real. In this article I'll show you how I built a fully serverless TODO REST API using AWS SAM, Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB, all running locally for free using LocalStack. What I Built A fully serverless REST API that manages TODO items with full CRUD operations. POST /todos to create a new todo GET /todos to retrieve all todos GET /todos/{id} to retrieve a single todo PUT /todos/{id} to update a todo DELETE /todos/{id} to delete a todo The entire stack is defined as infrastructure as code using AWS SAM. No clicking around the console, no manual resource creation. Jus