Microservice development accommodates several kinds of dev env setups. For cross-service integration testing during development (rather than test automation), we’d like the local service under development to connect out to the integrated, shared service running in the cloud rather than have devs run a bunch of services locally concurrently.

Besides the networking/routing challenges this presents, we’re a bit mystified about the best way to manage data in this situation. If any services need to agree on what a given entity ID corresponds to (say, user or organization IDs), any local dev state needs to be compatible with any state in the shared cloud service.

How are people doing this in practice? We can only find vague theories online which don’t get into the details of data management in local/shared cloud service integration development.