Jorge Morales Pou

When developing with Educates on a local machine, many developers rely on the local DNS resolver functionality to provide their Educates cluster with a meaningful hostname. A common approach is to use a domain like educates.test for consistent local cluster access.

However, laptop users frequently encounter network transitions—moving between office, home, conference, or other network environments. These transitions result in IP address changes that break DNS resolution for the configured hostname. When this occurs, the cluster becomes inaccessible via the expected domain name, requiring manual DNS resolver updates.

This issue can be particularly frustrating when the DNS resolver is running in the background, as the root cause may not be immediately apparent. To address this challenge, I developed an automated solution that monitors IP address changes and updates the DNS resolver configuration accordingly.

We are excited to announce the launch of Educates Hub, the official resource aggregator for the Educates community! You can explore it today at https://hub.educates.dev.

Educates Hub is your new central destination for discovering, sharing, and managing resources for your workshops. Our goal is to create a vibrant ecosystem where the community can easily access high-quality content and tools to make the most out of Educates.

Managing multiple versions of the educates training platform binary can be a hassle—especially when you need to switch between versions for different projects, test new releases, or roll back to a previous version. Manual downloads, renaming, and path management are error-prone and time-consuming.

Enter educatesenv, a simple CLI tool to install, switch, and manage multiple versions of the educates CLI, inspired by tools like tfenv and rbenv.

In Educates 3.0, we introduced a new installer mechanism designed to simplify the deployment of Educates on your preferred cluster infrastructure. This new approach provides an opinionated yet flexible way to set up the platform, addressing common challenges faced by our users.

Before Educates 3.0, installation was limited to deploying the Educates Training Platform on an existing Kubernetes cluster. However, we realized that many users lacked the technical expertise to configure a fully functional Kubernetes cluster with all the necessary prerequisites. Tasks such as setting up an ingress controller, managing certificates, configuring DNS, and enforcing policies often posed significant barriers to adoption. To address this, we developed a streamlined installer that abstracts these complexities, making it easier for users to adopt the Educates Training Platform.

In this article, we’ll explore how the new installer works, the supported cluster infrastructure providers in Educates 3.2.0, and the design decisions behind its implementation. Let’s dive in!

When you run Educates locally, it's easy to go with the defaults, just create your Educates cluster as explained in the Getting Started on Kind article.

But that is not the most optimal workflow. Why?

Because we recommend using SSL for your local environment, and for that, we also recommend to use a recognizable DNS name for your cluster. This makes things easier, and also shields you from roaming, so that when you move from one location to another, and your ip changes, the nip.io address change don't affect you. Also, using a name for your cluster makes things easier when you want to have your descriptors or config under version control.

We will demonstrate how to:

• Create a local Certificate Authority (CA) so that you can have trust between your local computer and your cluster
• Configure a local DNS resolver to provide your cluster with a recognizable name
• Create your cluster so that it uses both and creates ingresses to your workshops using working SSL

Now that you have created your local cluster it's time to create your first workshop.

Educates CLI provides commands to get you started, and provides you with a skeleton of a workshop. This workshop is not going to have any addition, but we will be augmenting this workshop's content and capabilities in later posts.

Educates Training Platform is very easy to install locally in order to get started. Just download the educates binary for the latest release for your operating system and architecture, and once placed wherever you put your binaries, just need to run:

educates create-cluster

As easy as that.

I am happy to announce a significant change regarding the Educates project, an interactive training platform for hands-on labs hosted on Kubernetes.

Educates was a collaborative open source initiative spearheaded by Graham Dumpleton and myself (Jorge Morales) which has been developed over the past five years. It was initially developed while working for VMware, and subsequently Broadcom following their acquisition of VMware.

Recently however, both Graham and myself were impacted by the latest round of cuts by Broadcom subsequent to the takeover of VMware. This left Broadcom in possession of the Educates project without active maintainers.