Breakpoints in Your Pod: Interactively Debugging Kubernetes Applications - Daniel Lipovetsky, D2IQ
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 2023-05-01

Breakpoints in Your Pod: Interactively Debugging Kubernetes Applications - Daniel Lipovetsky, D2IQ

Interactive debugging has been around for decades. Being able to set breakpoints, watch expressions, and “stepping” through code not only helps investigate bugs, it helps us learn how complex applications work. Debugging an application in Kubernetes is like debugging a remote process, but with more challenges. Container images frequently have executables without debug symbols, and no debugger server executable.The typical Pod does not run a debugger server, and does not expose a port on which a debugger client could connect. The target executable is in a separate mount namespace, and the target process in a separate process namespace. This session will demonstrate how to solve these challenges by using ephemeral containers, and widely-available, open-source tools. Along with these tools, we will use an IDE to simultaneously, interactively debug multiple, cooperating controllers from the Cluster API project.