Imagine that you’re at your company’s all-hands meeting and one of the sellers is proudly ringing the office gong to celebrate closing a big deal with a client who’s on the other side of the world. It’s a big deal because it’s a major project. Their logo is going to look sleek on your website, and you are finally breaking into a new region of the world. But two months after the project kicks off, the situation isn’t looking as rosy.

When designing and building software, service reliability is always at the top of the list of critical focus areas for development teams. Every team that builds software typically has, either directly or indirectly, service level agreements with their customers. These are, essentially, agreed-upon metrics or performance criteria that teams use to measure and ensure the reliability of a software system.

Often hailed as a game-changer, Kubernetes has altered the way that organizations deploy and manage their software, making the job of handling larger and more complex workloads easier. Yet, with its advantages of velocity and scale come new challenges, particularly in how developers approach debugging their code. The highly distributed nature of Kubernetes that makes it so effective for handling cloud-native software means that the traditional approaches to debugging are no longer applicable.

You know the phrase “good enough”? As in, “it’s good enough right now, we can worry about fixing it in the future”? Well, when it comes to software development, I really hate that phrase. Let me explain why. Simply, it’s because the concept of ‘good enough’ isn’t true. It’s the best type of paradox. Something is either good or it’s holding you back.

When working with Rookout customers, one of the most commonly heard requests we hear is a plea for “context”. When trying to debug a complex applications, setting a Non-Breaking Breakpoint and fetching a full view of local variables and stack trace is a necessary first step. But in a complex, distributed environment, this first step is not always enough.

When you talk to an enterprise development team these days, there is a good chance they are in the midst of either migrating applications to the cloud or building a Cloud Native greenfield application. While there are many approaches to running those applications in the cloud, Kubernetes often comes to the forefront as the platform of choice. It provides a powerful container orchestration platform, which provides plenty of room for growth as your application evolves.