Container Debugging and Troubleshooting

Containers fail in ways that feel mysterious because the usual debugging instincts — SSH in, tail a file, attach a debugger — do not map cleanly to a process that may have already exited, has no shell, and writes its logs to a stream rather than disk. A container that exits immediately, restarts in a loop, cannot reach another service, or gets killed under load each has a characteristic signature, and knowing how to read those signatures turns a baffling outage into a quick diagnosis. Effective container debugging is a systematic process: inspect the exit code and logs, examine the container's configuration and events, reproduce the environment, and probe networking and resources methodically. This lesson builds that toolkit so that when a container misbehaves in development or production, you can localise the fault quickly rather than guessing.