Debugging remote services developed on the cloud

Cloud based development platforms are getting more widely used as the cloud services become more available and the performance of such platforms increase. One of the key issues in providing a cloud based development platform is to enable the developers to debug their code just as efficiently and effectively as they would perform in a desktop IDE development session. However, especially if the development of a remote service is being carried out, the debugging client and the server running the actual code is separated, disclosing many problems which are not present in a usual debugging session. This paper proposes a record/replay approach to deal with the problems of remote debugging. To keep the communication overhead of the proposed approach as small as possible, the debugger saves the variable values only for external data access such as getting the data from a database query or a web service call. The proposed approach is integrated to a real world cloud based development platform and the run-time overhead is measured on real world case studies to demonstrate the usefulness of the approach.