Ephemeral containers and kubectl debug
Good production containers often have no shell — the leaner a distroless image, the fewer debugging tools, so kubectl exec is stuck. This article uses ephemeral containers: slip a tooling container temporarily into a running pod without restarting it or modifying its image. It digs into the semantics per the docs, then verifies all three modes of kubectl debug — attach to a running pod, copy the pod, and debug a node directly — on a real cluster.
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KaiMay 24, 2026· 21 views