Education Platform/Resources for Trying Out Kubernetes

General Discussions
1

Hi everyone,

I’m currently helping to organize an educational event where some co-workers and me were invited to conduct a (one-time) workshop for several hours at a university.

We want to provide the students with some hands-on experience with their own K8s cluster, but we cannot expect them to come prepared with k8s experience or minikube on their laptops.
This is why we would either need some real trial accounts somewhere for everyone (I’m guessing 1-2 dozen, but I don’t know exact numbers yet), so they could create real clusters.

Alternatively we thought we could use some kind of platform that lets you run a cluster for learning purposes. However we want to show responses from pods vs ingresses, so it would be good if you could access the cluster via HTTP and also kubectl port-forward/proxy into it.
I’ve quickly glanced at a few platforms but I suspect they just fake their responses based on the correct user input and don’t really spin up full-featured clusters.

I once participated in a GCloud workshop on a conference where a test account for that day was provided with which you could create your own GKE cluster. This would be the perfect solution, but I’ve found no particular way to contact someone for that matter. (In fact that’s how I found this forum) I’d also suspect this would only possible with a Google developer advocate doing the workshop.

Has anyone done something like this before or knows of a good platform (or alternative solution) to achieve this?

1 Like
2

Play with Kubernetes offers something similar to what you are looking for. Not sure if it’s full features but it might be worth a look.

3

<— Academic employee :slight_smile: (University of Michigan)

Depending on where you’re based/which University you’re associated with you can gain access to Jetstream to provide VMs for classes. You can then use kubeadm or use minikube with the --vm-driver=none.

4

Google does give you 300$ of credit on GCP.
you could have a project there, set them up as users and give them privileges that allow them to spin up VMs as well as managed clusters.
300$ should also be enough for a single day of activity.

5

Thanks for all your suggestions.

Since it’s a german university and as far as I understand independent from any class, unfortunately I don’t think Jetstream is an option.

PWK looks promising although I haven’t been able to reach anything externally yet.

The idea to use a new GCP trial is actually quite a enticing one. Can hardly beat the comfort of GKE plus CloudShell.

1 Like
6

Hi @xcq1,

At CloudYuga, we recently launched a platform to cater such needs. Our platform offers Kubernetes content and have ways to connect to any Kubernetes Cluster. You can watch following video to get quick introduction :-

Here is what can be done.

  1. We can use free account of any cloud provider. Generally I do with DigitalOcean.
  2. From the platform (tool), call a Terraform script to create the cluster.
  3. Use the created cluster from the tool.

Let me know if this interests you.

1 Like