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Building a Firecracker-Powered Course Platform to Learn Docker and Kubernetes


Five years of technical blogging followed by six months of active development resulted in an online learning-by-doing platform for DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineers.

The second, practical, part though, is meant to be something that I haven't seen in the wild much - think of LeetCode- or even CodinGame-styled exercises (with interactive solution checking, gamification elements, and whatnot) but for Docker, Kubernetes, and other typical tools and technologies used by DevOps, SRE, or Platform engineers. The high-level idea is that there is a (static) web application, a central component called Foreman, concerned with everything but the playgrounds, and a fleet of horizontally scalable bare-metal servers (workers) behind it, each running a number of microVMs. The egress traffic from the free-tier microVMs is not just rate-limited but also restricted to DNS and HTTP(S) and only to an allow-listed set of hosts (this part was a bit tricky to implement, but thanks to my extensive experience with Envoy and Istio, I got it seemingly right after a few iterations).

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