offline-ssm-provider: please clarify intended behavior or update docs to state

[bitsofinfo]

Unfortunately this plugin now has me confused and raises a larger issue.

Maybe I'm mis-understanding what functionality this plugin is supposed to provide.

My impression was that this plugin provided the following:

I thought that if you had a local .ssm file when running serverless-offline it would always use the value in .ssm... regardless if one existed and was accessible in the real AWS SSM store.

However it appears that the .ssm file will ONLY be used when either you don't have access to the real value in AWS SSM, it can't be found in AWS SSM or you are truely "offline" don't have any network connectivity. If you do have access to the live AWS SSM value over the network, that will be used and not the local .ssm one (when in serverless-offline) mode.

Is this (the latter) the intended behavior?

I thought the purpose of this plugin was so that when using serverless offline, I could reference non-production secrets via the local .ssm mechanism, while my real AWS SSM secrets would only be utilized when running deployed in AWS.