The presentation discusses the use of service mesh and ephemeral containers in Kubernetes for debugging and observability purposes, with a focus on Kafka as an example.
- Service mesh can be used for initial metadata requests in Kafka, but subsequent requests should go directly to specific brokers
- TCP observability is limited in service mesh, so TCP dump and Wireshark can be used for packet captures
- Ephemeral containers can be used to share network namespaces and run debugging tools like TCP dump
- The speaker suggests integrating ephemeral containers into other open source tools like CaseNIc and using them for remote captures on pods