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11 posts tagged with "Educates"

Educates Training Platform

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Automating DNS Resolver Updates for Dynamic IP Addresses on macOS

· 4 min read
Jorge Morales Pou
Lead Software Engineer

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.

Announcing Educates Hub

· 2 min read
Jorge Morales Pou
Lead Software Engineer

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.

Terraform deployment quickstart

· 10 min read
Bill Kable
Engineer

Hi all, we are happy to announce we are now sharing the Educates Terraform Modules project that provides support for deploying Educates on Amazon and Google Cloud providers.

Its release versions are independent from the Educates Training Platform releases; however, it is currently tested and verified to work on Educates 3.2.x and 3.3.x on Kubernetes version 1.32.

We've provided the quick start here so you can experiment with it and give feedback.

Managing educates versions with educatesenv

· 3 min read
Jorge Morales Pou
Lead Software Engineer

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.

Installing Educates on a cloud provider (Part 2 - Verification)

· 10 min read
Bill Kable
Engineer

In the Installing Educates on a cloud provider post, we covered the highlights of installing Educates 3.x on Google Cloud using the Educates cli.

This post is the second part, verification of the installation including the following:

  • Verification of the platform components
  • Deploy and verify a training portal and workshop

We decided to make this a separate post, as the verification steps are agnostic to the cloud platform.

Note that we do not do a deep-dive discussion of the architecture or installed components. We will have subsequent posts dissecting the Educates architecture to discuss how the components interact.

How the installer works (Part 1)

· 6 min read
Jorge Morales Pou
Lead Software Engineer

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!

How to best work locally

· 7 min read
Jorge Morales Pou
Lead Software Engineer

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