That said, the pattern we recommend to follow is to split it into smaller dev envs. That makes it easier to manage, and allows you to have dedicated dev envs for different parts of your app (e.g. your API dev env and your frontend dev env).
Splitting parts of an env is against our principles tho, put everything together and test against real endpoints where possible, there is no api dev env or web or app, there is just a dev env.
And Okteto Cloud (https://okteto.com) our development platform for Kubernetes Applications, that integrates everything you need to build cloud native apps (development environments, a build service, a private registry, SSL endpoints, etc...)