Hacker News Reader

Comment by imbriaco | Hacker News Reader

> Tooling/Perf/etc is not needed when running (do you really want to debug in production) but tooling can be used in the process of development.

Whether or not you want to debug in production, reality often means that you will see things in a live environment that you will not see in other environments.

Unikernels are very interesting and have a number of compelling attributes, but let's not pretend that the current state of available tooling for troubleshooting, instrumentation, and general debugging isn't a challenge.

View on HN

hah. they're a new technology/approach. of course there are going to be challenges.

You're moving the goal posts and invoking a straw man. No one is advocating for "pretending", and the anti-unikernel argument is that the inherent cost of unikernels in general is the loss of kernel debugging tools; not simply that "right now the unikernel debugging experience is subpar".

in general right now, running on a full-featured monolithic kernel, the debugging experience is really pretty bad. especially in the target environment of horizontal clustered services or lots of little micro services.

so I actually believe there is an opportunity here to focus on the important pieces (network messages, control flow tracing, memory footprints, etc) after ejecting a huge amount of irrelevant stuff

Totally agree, there's definitely an opportunity there if the surface area of what the system is doing gets smaller. The big difference today is that it's a lot easier to compose a debugging suite using additional tools on top of a traditional host-based runtime for now.

Definitely excited to see how the technology evolves over the next few years. It hasn't moved as fast as I'd have expected over the last 2-3 years but I'd love to see that accelerate.

No, I'm not moving any goal posts. I was reacting to the statement "Tooling/Perf/etc is not needed when running". I'm not sure where you'd get the idea that I'm anti-unikernel, I just wanted to not disregard that challenge since it does matter.

I took care not to say that you were anti-unikernel; I was articulating the anti-unikernel position. I'm not sure what you actually meant, so I'll take you at your word that you weren't moving goal posts--in whatever case, the OP is correct that unikernels aren't inherently less debugable even though mature debug tooling may not exist for them today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com