Following the lingering promise of managed infrastructure, reduced operational cost, and resiliency, cloud computing has seen phenomenal trends in adoption since the past decade. As software development marches towards the cloud, we soon realize that this shift warrants the need to rethink our debugging strategies. This is because as software systems are now leveraging these advancements in cloud computing and distributed systems we see gaps emerging in debugging that cannot be satisfied by the traditional methods of logging and breakpoints.
For example, a major issue while using breakpoints is that the codebase needs to be run in debug mode. Therefore, we are not actually replicating the actual state of our systems taking into consideration multi-threading, distributed services, and dependencies on remote services in a cloud-native environment along with multi-service architecture. Similarly, logs offer no respite, as they may be cumbersome and even costly to execute and store.