The nature of software is by default deeply nested, making bug hunting always a work of forensics. In distributed systems, there may be only a few lines of code but there can be a long trail of dependencies that makes bugs also difficult to detect. It's a chain of dependencies with bugs that might be anywhere.

It's a problem that is emerging as the container ecosystem and distributed systems get more sophisticated and applied on a larger scale. We discussed this often at Software Circus, thinking about priorities as enterprise customers consider how to use containers and orchestrators in production.

To the surface comes a lot of issues not previously needed to address. It speaks to the need for specifications and standards so these loosely coupled systems can work together.

"There may be tens of services involved -- the bug could be anywhere," said Gareth Rushgrove of Puppet who talked to us at Software Circus.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/MHnz7CdWOX4