I had a similar set up and it made debugging really easy. Instead of building and running every app you could just run the full environment with known good images and replace the app you're working on with the debuggable instance running in the IDE.
These days you can even build, and deploy a debuggable image from an IDE easily so you don't need to bridge the network.
Practically speaking how was that implemented? I would guess maybe an environment variable per app? I'm just starting out with this kind of setup on a personal project
These days you can even build, and deploy a debuggable image from an IDE easily so you don't need to bridge the network.