Open Source Summit North America 2022

Brian Kernigham said: “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.” In fact, debugging in a modern production environment is even harder - orchestrators spinning containers up and down and weird networking wizardry that keeps everything glued together, make understanding systems that much more difficult than it used to be. And, while k8s is well understood by DevOps people by now, it remains a nut that developers are still trying to crack. Where do you start when there’s a production problem? How do you get the tools you’re used to in the remote container? How do you understand what is running where and what is its current state? In this talk, we will review debugging a production application deployed to a Kubernetes cluster, and review kubectl debug - a new feature from the Kubernetes sig-cli team. In addition, we’ll review the open source KoolKits project that offers a set of (opinionated) tools for kubectl debug. KoolKits builds on top of kubectl debug by adding everything you need right into the image. When logging into a container, we’re often hit with the scarcity of tools at our disposal. No vim (for better or worse), no DB clients, no htop, no debuggers, etc… KoolKits solves those problems in an elegant way...