Software Engineer at day. Tech Storyteller at night. Helping people master Containers.
Learning by doing with iximiuz Labs 🚀
Hello friends!
Ivan's back, and with some exciting news!
For years, I’ve been dreaming about interactive playgrounds to augment my blog and let readers play with Linux, Docker, and Kubernetes right in their browsers…
I started experimenting with different tech that could make it happen around mid-2021. I picked up some frontend development skills, played with Firecracker microVMs, skilled up in containers, and more.
And finally, after spending lots of evenings, weekends, and the good part of my PTOs, I’ve got something deployed…
Allow me to introduce you to iximiuz Labs 🚀
On labs.iximiuz.com you can fire up a disposable Linux playground in a matter of seconds:
- Ubuntu
- Alpine Linux
- Rocky Linux
- Kubernetes (K3s)
- Docker
- nerdctl + containerd + BuildKit
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The above playgrounds should make experimenting with Docker and Kubernetes much simpler. One of the next steps is to integrate these capabilities directly with iximiuz.com so that you can play with the stuff you’re reading about right in the browser.
And, of course, it’s just the beginning - even more to come in the near future! For instance, one of my goals is to start producing courses leveraging the labs platform - an ideal mix of theory, juicy visuals, and interactivity.
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The opportunities are endless, but I need your support! If you feel like this platform is something you could benefit from, please consider becoming a patron. And in addition to my sincere gratitude, you'll get free early access and a life-long discount when the platform graduates from alpha.
Happy learning!
Ivan
P.S. The detailed technical blogpost and/or email on the platform's internals is coming too :)
Ivan Velichko
Software Engineer at day. Tech Storyteller at night. Helping people master Containers.
Hello friends! Ivan's here - with a well overdue February roundup of all things Linux, Containers, Kubernetes, and Server-Side craft 🧙 What I was working on A lot of stuff on the dev side - not so much on the content side. But things are soon to reverse 🤞 Announcing labCTL - the long-awaited iximiuz Labs CLI A dozen people have asked me over the past year-ish if there'll be access to the playgrounds from the local terminal and not only from the browser. And while I myself wanted this feature...
Hello there! 👋 Debugging containerized applications is... challenging. Debugging apps that use slim variants of container images is double challenging. And debugging slim containers in hardened production environments is often close to impossible. Before jumping to the DevOps problems that I prepared for you this week, let's review a few tricks that can be used to troubleshoot containers. If the container has a shell inside, running commands in it with docker exec (or kubectl exec) is...
Hey hey! Are you ready for your next DevOps challenge? Last week, we all witnessed yet another terrifying cyber-security event, and this time, it was a direct hit - researchers from Snyk discovered a way to break out of containers! 🤯 The vulnerability was found in the fundamental component of the containerization ecosystem - the most popular implementation of the (low-level) OCI container runtime - runc. Notice how, on the diagram above, most high-level container runtimes actually rely on the...