Many organizations adopt cloud native development practices with the goal of shipping features faster. The technologies and architectures may change when we move to the cloud, but the fact remains that we all still add the occasional bug to our code. The challenge here is that many of your existing local debugging tools and practices can’t be used when everything is running in a container or deployed onto Kubernetes running in the cloud. This is where the open source Telepresence tool can help. Join Daniel to learn about: - Quick overview of remote-local ("remocal") options and tooling e.g. “kubectl port-forward”, Skaffold, ksync, Telepresence etc. - An exploration of how Telepresence can “intercept” or reroute traffic from a specified service in a remote K8s cluster to your local dev machine -- The benefits of getting a “hot reload” fast feedback loop between applications being developed locally and apps running in the remote environment

1. Debugging Microservices "Remocally"
in Kubernetes with Telepresence
Daniel Bryant
@danielbryantuk

2. @danielbryantuk
tl;dr
2
• The inner development loop can be painful with microservices & Kubernetes
• Telepresence “proxies” your local machine into the cluster, increasing fast feedback
• Telepresence enables remote-to-local “remocal” development
• Telepresence supports several workflows to make you more productive
• Please support this CNCF project — get involved!

3. @danielbryantuk
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4. Setting the Scene
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5. @danielbryantuk
Inner and outer dev loops
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Hat tip to Mitch Denny (now 404): https://mitchdenny.com/the-inner-loop/
http://jorgemoral.es/posts/2020_03_17-develop_apps…

6. @danielbryantuk
SOA: There’s just more stu
ff
(and dependencies)
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7. @danielbryantuk
So, let’s run everything locally…
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8. @danielbryantuk
tl;dr
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“My laptop only has 16GB
RAM and you’re asking it
to run Kubernetes and a
JVM and a database???”

9. @danielbryantuk
Okay, let’s run everything remotely…
9

10. @danielbryantuk
Inner and outer dev loops with K8s
can be the same
10
• Write code
• Build container
• Push to registry
• Deploy to cluster
• Test
And can be …. SLOW.

11. @danielbryantuk
Automation can help…
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12. @danielbryantuk
tl;dr
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But you want a really fast inner loop (no docker build/push) …

13. @danielbryantuk
tl;dr
13 And you want to use your own tools.

14. @danielbryantuk
tl;dr
14
And you want to avoid the “works on my machine”
production vs local dev debacle

15. @danielbryantuk
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16. @danielbryantuk
What is Telepresence
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• “Fancy Kubernetes VPN for development”
• “kubectl port-forward on steroids”
• “kubectl proxy all-the-things”
• A network bridge between your laptop and the Kubernetes cluster

17. @danielbryantuk
Telepresence: Local-to-Remote bridge
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18. @danielbryantuk
Telepresence: Local-to-Remote bridge
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_a3aErN3NU

19. Demo Time!
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20. @danielbryantuk
Telepresence: Local-to-Remote bridge
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telepresence connect
• Open a tunnel to the remote cluster; exposes “in-cluster” services/network/DNS
telepresence intercept my-service —port 3000
• Re-routes (intercepts) tra
ff
ic to my-service in the remote cluster to my local machine
telepresence login & telepresence intercept
• Create preview URL to isolate and share results of the intercept

21. @danielbryantuk
Telepresence: Local-to-Remote bridge
$ telepresence intercept dataprocessingnodeservice --port 3000
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Using deployment dataprocessingnodeservice
intercepted
State : ACTIVE
Destination : 127.0.0.1:3000
Intercepting: HTTP requests that match all of:
header("x-telepresence-intercept-id") ~= regexp ("76a1e848-1829-74x-1138-e3294c1e9119:dataprocessingnodeservice")
Preview URL : https://[random-subdomain].preview.edgestack.me
www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_a3aErN3NU

22. @danielbryantuk
Preview URLs, Personal Intercepts
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23. Docker Desktop Extension for Telepresence
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getambassador.io/testing-with-telepresence-and-docker

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25. The Good, the Bad, and the
“Don’t Try this at Home”
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26. @danielbryantuk
Benefits
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• Use any tool that runs on your laptop: IDE, profiler, debugger, …
• Connect to cloud-based resources
• Same network namespace (e.g., curl and ping work)
• Very fast inner loop!

27. @danielbryantuk
Requirements
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• Network connection
• kubectl access to cluster
• Supports all modern OSs: Mac, Linux, or Windows Native/WSL2
• A cooperative VPN!
https://blog.getambassador.io/implementing-telepresence-networking-with-a-tun-device-a23a786d51e9

28. @danielbryantuk
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29. @danielbryantuk
tl;dr
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• Capturing DNS and routing selectively to the
cluster is tricky
• Maintaining proxy connections can be
challenging
• Kubernetes has many resource types
• No two laptops are alike
• No two clusters are alike
• And more

30. @danielbryantuk
Telepresence is a CNCF project, with a wide variety of users
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31. Wrapping up
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32. @danielbryantuk
Conclusion
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• The inner development loop can be painful with microservices & Kubernetes
• Telepresence “proxies” your local machine into the cluster, increasing fast feedback
• Telepresence enables remote-to-local “remocal” development
• Telepresence supports several workflows to make you more productive
• Please support this CNCF project — get involved!

33. @danielbryantuk
Thank you! Questions?
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getambassador.io/products/telepresence
getambassador.io/testing-with-telepresence-and-docker
Easy Debugging of Spring Boot Microservices Running on
Kubernetes
AL Developer O
ff
ice Hours
db@datawire.io / @danielbryantuk

34. @danielbryantuk
Contributing to Telepresence
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• Documentation and workflows
• Explain how you integrate Telepresence into your development workflow
• Let us know if you’re a user!
• Triage
• Lots of folks use GitHub for support, which doesn’t scale well
• Join Slack to help other users https://a8r.io/slack #telepresence