Debugging ☕ Kubernetes Pods Like A Champ 🦸🏻‍♂️
Tags: kubernetes, beginners, container, docker
Published: 2024-02-07 20:35:11

After working with Kubernetes as DevOps engineer it becomes easy to debug or keep track to your pods. But what if you are a software engineer who has not much idea what's going on inside the containers, and you are not aware what should be done after every new release to production.

Well here we go...

In this article I will help you to have better understanding how you can debug your pods, how you can keep track of the latest releases, what are the best ways, and finally as overall how you can tackle issues when you have new code pushed and facing some bugs.

As always I will split the content into simple points, which will make the idea easier and straight to the point.

- The Importance of Continuous Monitoring 🔍
- Techniques for Debugging Pods 🔧
- Monitoring Pod Logs 📋
- SSH into Pods 🚪
- Running Tests Inside Pods 🧪
- Debugging Tools and Resources 🧰

### The Importance of Continuous Monitoring 🔍

Continuous monitoring is a critical in improving and staying up-to-date with your system. By maintaining a constant watch over key parameters, continuous monitoring ensures the security, efficiency, and reliability of operations, allowing organizations to detect anomalies, prevent disruptions, and respond quickly to emerging challenges. This proactive approach enhances overall system resilience and contributes to a robust and secure operational environment.

### Techniques for Debugging Pods 🔧

Debugging pods in a Kubernetes environment requires a set of techniques to identify and resolve issues effectively. Techniques for debugging pods involve a combination of observability, troubleshooting, and diagnostic strategies. 

### Monitoring Pod Logs 📋

Always you need to monitor your application logs, if you deploy new feature or let's say you have pushed code to staging environment, you should keep track what logs are being generated from your application.

### SSH into Pods 🚪

When working with Kubernetes and containers, all your application logs are written inside your container or let's say your machine that the application is being run. And if your application becomes bigger you start using tools such as Datadog to monitor all these logs and inject them into one centralized place. But as an easy way you can always ssh into your pods and view/debug the logs there.

### Running Tests Inside Pods 🧪

Many applications run tests inside the container itself to validate and confirm everything is as expected. As a software engineer is very essential to be aware of this test cases and how you can execute them. Also many architectures run these testes within the CICD pipeline inside a temporary container for example.

### Debugging Tools and Resources 🧰

There are a lot of tools out there that help you to debug and monitor your Kubernetes infrastructure, or containers in general.

Here are some useful tools 😉
- Kubectl
- Grafana
- K9s
- Lens
- Prometheus

#### Conclusion

There is many topics and details to cover related to Kubernetes but what I wanted to focus on is that; it's not just about writing a nice piece of code and pushing it to main, where’s as software engineer you should track your code performance, be up-to-date with the logs, and always stay ready if something fails and how can be fixed at least from the application level (code).

If you did like my content, and want to see more, feel free to connect with me on ➡️ [Awedis LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/awedis), happy to guide or help with anything that needs clarification 😊💁