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Hands-on events

Every Attendee in a working environment within seconds of sitting down

For DevRel leads and event organizers planning a conference or customer workshop, and the Presenters who run the room.

Each Attendee opens one URL, enters the event's access code and starts a Session of their own, created before they arrived. When the event ends, you delete the training portal and every Session goes with it.

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The problem

  1. Setup eats the first half hour

    Half the room is still installing tools when you want to start, and the other half is helping them. The workshop you planned for ninety minutes gets sixty.

  2. Every laptop is different

    Other versions, a corporate proxy, no admin rights. The step that worked in rehearsal breaks on row six, and you debug someone's machine while the room waits.

  3. Someone has to clean up

    After the event, the clusters, accounts and cloud resources people created keep running, and keep costing, until someone finds and deletes them.

How Educates fits

  • Sessions ready before the room fills

    Create Sessions ahead of time for most of the room, and keep a few in reserve so late arrivals start at once too. The docs' own example creates 75 up front for an event capped at 100, then keeps 5 ready as people trickle in.

    Ready Sessions⁠

  • One URL and one code for the room

    Put the portal's URL and an event access code on your first slide. With anonymous access nobody registers an account, and a cap of one Session at a time per Attendee keeps anyone from starting a second.

    Training portal⁠

  • The whole workshop on one page

    Each Attendee works in a Session of their own, with the instructions beside terminals, a VS Code based editor, the Kubernetes console and your slides, all in the browser. Steps can run with a click, and checks can tell each Attendee a step worked before the next one builds on it. With nothing to install, the first step is the workshop's first step.

    Workshop dashboard⁠Isolated Sessions⁠Clickable actions⁠Examiner checks⁠

  • Booths and laptops too

    At a booth, run a portal of short workshops; visitors pick a topic, work through it, and their Session is deleted when they finish. With no cluster at all, a single workshop runs in one container on your laptop's Docker, for a demo across the table that needs no Kubernetes.

    Training portal⁠Local authoring⁠

For the Builder

How it works

Four steps take you from nothing to a room full of Sessions, and back to nothing.

  1. A cluster for the event. Create a Kubernetes cluster and install Educates on it with the educates CLI. The cluster requirements cover sizing, the ingress controller, wildcard DNS and TLS.
  2. A training portal. Create a TrainingPortal for your workshop with an event access code, anonymous access, one Session at a time per Attendee and Sessions created up front, like the one below.
  3. One URL for the room. Put the portal's URL and the access code on your first slide. Attendees open it, enter the code and start the workshop.
  4. Teardown after. When the event ends, delete the training portal, and its Sessions are deleted with it. Delete the cluster too if you made it for the event.

This portal runs the Kubernetes Fundamentals workshop from the Hub for up to 100 Attendees, with 75 Sessions created before the doors open:

training-portal.yaml
apiVersion: training.educates.dev/v1beta1
kind: TrainingPortal
metadata:
  name: hands-on-event
spec:
  portal:
    password: <event access code>
    registration:
      type: anonymous
    sessions:
      maximum: 100
      anonymous: 1
  workshops:
    - name: lab-k8s-fundamentals
      initial: 75
      reserved: 5

Leave orphaned unset at an event like this, so a Session survives a coffee break with the laptop asleep. The TrainingPortal reference explains expiry, extensions and the other settings.

What you bring

Educates is the core, not the whole job. This is what it leaves to you, so you can plan for it before you commit.

  • The cluster, and someone to run it

    Educates runs on a Kubernetes cluster you provide; it is not a hosted service. The docs give no sizing per Attendee and suggest starting with three worker nodes of 16 to 32 GB each, so size it for your workshop and do a full-size dry run. For a small one-off event, running a cluster can be more work than it saves.

    What the docs say: The cluster, and someone to run it⁠ (external site)

  • No live view of the room

    There is no trainer view of how far each Attendee has got. You find out who is stuck the way you always have, by walking the room or asking.

  • No video or chat

    Educates does not include video or virtual classroom features. For an online event, run it beside the meeting tool you already use.

    What the docs say: No video or chat⁠ (external site)

  • Attendance is yours to record

    The portal can post events to your webhook as Sessions start, pages are viewed and Sessions finish, or send them to Google Analytics, which ad blockers and firewalls can stop. Nothing stores the webhook's events for you, and with anonymous access the portal never asks for a name, so you count Sessions, not people.

    What the docs say: Attendance is yours to record⁠ (external site)

Proof

Read how it is done

Deploy it from the Hub

The Hub is a catalog of workshops you deploy on your own Educates, each with one command.

Explore the Hub

Try it yourself, or talk to us

Get started runs Educates on your laptop with a first workshop in a few commands. Get help is where you ask the community, and where you can hire the people who build Educates.

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