Educates began as a tool for one team: developer advocates who needed to train people in Kubernetes and show developer tools running on it. Today it is an independent open source project, and it teaches any topic that benefits from a live environment.

---
config:
  timeline:
    disableMulticolor: true
---
timeline
    Dec 2019 : First commit
    Sep 2020 : SpringOne 2020
    Early 2021 : Learning Center fork
    Jun 2022 : Educates 2.0
    Aug 2024 : Educates 3.0
    Oct 2024 : Independent project
    Jun 2025 : Educates Hub

A tool for developer advocates

The first commit to the Educates repository dates from December 2019. Graham Dumpleton and Jorge Morales developed it while working at VMware, for a team of developer advocates who needed to train people in Kubernetes and show developer tools running on it.

The online SpringOne 2020 conference ran its workshops on Educates: over 5,000 were delivered, for an AWS bill of about $200, as VMware's Open Sourcing Educates post recounts.

Learning Center

At the beginning of 2021, VMware took a fork of Educates 1.x into the Tanzu Application Platform as Learning Center. Workshops need changes to move between the two, as the migration notes explain.

Educates 2.0

Educates 2.0, released in June 2022, brought much of what defines Educates today: installation with Carvel packages, a local Educates environment for writing workshops, new workshop templates with GitHub actions to publish them, Kyverno to enforce security policies, support for OpenShift, a virtual cluster or a Git server for each Session, and an operator of its own to copy secrets between namespaces. The release notes list it all.

Educates 3.0

Educates 3.0, released in August 2024, overhauled how the educates CLI installs Educates and creates a local Kind cluster: kapp-controller was no longer needed in the cluster, and the CLI gained opinionated installs to cloud providers.

An independent project

VMware became part of Broadcom in November 2023, and in 2024 Broadcom's cuts left the project without active maintainers. Broadcom agreed to hand Educates over to the community, and in October 2024 it became an independent project: it moved to its own GitHub organization, github.com/educates, and educates.dev became its website.

Educates Hub

In June 2025, Educates Hub opened at hub.educates.dev: a catalog of workshops, and of extension packages for them, that you deploy on your own Educates.

Who runs Educates

Two maintainers look after the project, as its MAINTAINERS file lists: Graham Dumpleton and Jorge Morales.

Five organizations have added themselves to its ADOPTERS file: Broadcom, for Spring Academy, Kube Academy and Tanzu Academy; NETWAYS, for the NWS Playground, internal learning platforms and workshops on demand; 12F APS, for customer workshops and an internal sandbox; TeraSky, for internal training, customer workshops and demo environments; and Viam, for Viam Education's robotics courses. If you use Educates too, adding your organization to that file helps the project more than you might think.

To follow what comes next, watch the releases, or find the community on the Community page.