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Effective debugging of Docker containers
Bug Hunt
Docker must have passed the peak of its hype. New versions no longer trigger the same kind of hustle and bustle in the community and no longer provoke a flood of specialist articles, not least because a considerable amount of interest has shifted away from Docker in recent months toward solutions that use Docker as a basis for larger setups – such as Kubernetes.
Docker is now mainstream. Today it is no longer unusual to use the container solution where you might have relied on virtual machines (VMs) in the past. In this respect, Docker is only one of many virtualization solutions. However, the number of users who deal with Docker in the production environment is growing. As a result, an increasing number of developers and admins, who are unfamiliar with Docker, initially have problems with building and starting a Docker container.
In fact, many things can go wrong when building and operating a Docker container. If you approach a Docker problem with the mindset of an experienced kernel-based VM (KVM) admin, you will not get very far: Most things in Docker are fundamentally different from real VMs. Although you can log in to the latter and investigate a problem in the familiar shell environment, Docker offers its own interfaces for reading logfiles and displaying error messages, for example.
In this article, I describe in detail the options for debugging Docker and Docker containers. To start, I introduce various tips to make Docker containers debugging-friendly right from the start.
A Debugging Mindset
Building your own containers makes sense, because prebuilt containers from Docker Hub expose you to the risk of a black box model. On the outside, the container often does what it is supposed to do – what is inside the container and how it has been built, however, remain unclear. Compliance issues already preclude this approach in many companies. If you source your
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