[sbacic]

As a front-end dev, 3 things matter to me:

Can I trash the database without affecting the rest of the team?

Can I work on branches other than staging/prod (in case staging/prod is down or there is a bug)?

Can I perform common tasks (starting it up, querying the API, testing against it, etc..) without feeling like I'm pulling teeth?

If the answer is yes to all of them, I think the rest of the discussion becomes moot as it won't matter where the API is hosted.

One idea I'm currently toying with is having a completely automated build process for the API - ie, you call something like "docker-compose up" and it fetches the newest stable version of the API, migrates the database and sets up everything with sane defaults.