Kubernetes Architect | Integration Expert | TIBCO Guru

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Developer inspecting a distroless container with magnifying glass

Debugging Distroless Containers: kubectl debug, Ephemeral Containers, and When to Use Each

The container works fine in CI. It deploys successfully to staging. Then something goes wrong in production and you type the command you always type: kubectl exec -it my-pod — /bin/bash. The response is immediate: OCI runtime exec failed: exec failed: unable to start container process: exec: “/bin/bash”: stat /bin/bash: no such file or directory. You try /bin/sh. Same error. You try ls. Same error. The container image is distroless — it ships only your application binary and its runtime dependencies, with no shell, no package manager, no debugging tools of any kind. This is intentional and correct from a…