Praveen Sripati walks us through the notion of Ephemeral Containers:
It’s always CRITICAL to pack a Container image with the minimal binaries required as this makes the surface area of attack minimal, upgrading the image and testing also becomes easier as there are less variables to be addressed. Distroless Docker images can be used for the same. In the above diagram Container (A) has only the application and the dependent binaries and nothing more. So, if there are no debugging tools in the Container (A) nor any way to check the status of the process then how do we debug any problem in the application? Once a pod is created, it’s even not possible to add Containers to it for additional debugging tools.
That’s where the Ephemeral Containers come into picture as in the Container (B) in the above picture. These Containers are temporary that can be included in the Pod dynamically with additional debugging tools. Once a Ephemeral Container has been created, we can connect to it as usual using the kubectl attach, kubectl exec and kubectl logs commands.
It’s an interesting approach to the problem.