>Is this common at other companies that you cannot run the whole app locally to develop and test against?
It depends what you mean by the whole app. To reflect locally 100% of the conditions the big microservice app I am working on is very hard as I have to replicate locally multiple Kubernetes environments, Kibana, Data Dog, Elasticsearch, Consul and several databases and data stores.
What I can do, is to run one or more microservices locally, connected to remote development databases and speaking to other microservices and apps from some development Kubernetes environments.
It depends what you mean by the whole app. To reflect locally 100% of the conditions the big microservice app I am working on is very hard as I have to replicate locally multiple Kubernetes environments, Kibana, Data Dog, Elasticsearch, Consul and several databases and data stores.
What I can do, is to run one or more microservices locally, connected to remote development databases and speaking to other microservices and apps from some development Kubernetes environments.