Pods are the fundamental building block of Kubernetes applications. Since Pods are intended to be disposable and replaceable, you cannot add a container to a Pod once it has been created. Instead, you usually delete and replace Pods in a controlled fashion using deployments. Sometimes it's necessary to inspect the state of an existing Pod, however, for example to troubleshoot a hard-to-reproduce bug. In these cases you can run an ephemeral container in an existing Pod to inspect its state and run arbitrary commands.

Ephemeral containers are useful for interactive troubleshooting when `kubectl exec` is insufficient because a container has crashed or a container image doesn't include debugging utilities.

Faheem Memon, Principal Architect @ Amobee, will review the ephemeral containers feature (in beta since 1.23) and demonstrate potential practical implementations.