Secure and Debuggable: Debugging Slim, Scratch and Distroless Kubernet... Saiyam Pathak & Kyle Quest
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 2023-01-09

Don't miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from 18 - 21 April, 2023. Learn more at https://kubecon.io The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.

Secure and Debuggable: Debugging Slim, Scratch and Distroless Kubernetes Containers - Saiyam Pathak, Civo Limited & Kyle Quest, Slim AI

You reduced the attack surface of your containers with docker-slim or manually optimised scratch or distroless images, and you are super excited about it, but now you have a problem. How do you debug your app? You can't simply "kubectl exec" to your containers because there's no shell. You can't even "kubectl cp" to copy and run your debug tools! Kubernetes 1.25 is out, and the Ephemeral Containers capability is finally GA, which means it'll be available everywhere for you to use to debug your applications. In this talk, You'll learn how to use Ephemeral Containers as debugging tool sidecars to make your application container images as small as possible. You'll learn how "kubectl debug" uses Ephemeral Containers and its gotchas (what you get and don't get with "kubectl debug" by default). You'll also learn how it's possible to use Ephemeral Containers without "kubectl debug". Speakers will also discuss the existing debugging tool container images and how you can use them.