Cloud Debugging – A revolutionary Approach

Cloud Architecture/Development, 0

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There are cases where bugs are discovered only after the product is shipped and used by the end users. The main reason for these bugs that appear only in the production environment is the use of real user scenarios with real user data. Production debugging is about solving customer-facing issues that aren't easily reproducible in the development or testing environments. When it comes to cloud hosted application, production debugging becomes even harder. The code is running on multiple hosts, a business flow can span many services. A remote debugging session with the cloud is dangerous and may introduce side effects to the current running software, such as performance degradation, interruption of service, and data correctness issues. Microsoft provides a new feature that let you take a dump file of a service hosted in Azure. In an analogy, a dump file is like a single picture from a movie – a memory image of a single service in a single execution context. Viewing a dump file might reveal some facts about the execution state of the specific service, but it does not show the business flow and does not provide a way to single-step through the code. In this lecture, the audience will see a revolutionary tool and approach for a cloud production debugging. The participant will learn how to get series of related dump files, how to get the right version of the source code for the deployed solution, how to dig into the code and have a what-if scenarios where the developer can change the code and data and see the result without effecting the production environment. You will learn: 1. The difficulties of debugging modern cloud hosted application 2. Methods and tools for capturing state and debugging cloud hosted services 3. Azure, Visual Studio and OzCode Enterprise Cloud Debugger