Hello 👋

Ivan's here with a bunch of iximiuz Labs news and a portion of hands-on learning materials on Linux, networking, containers, Kubernetes, and eBPF.

But before we jump into the main issue, I want to feature the sponsor of the month - Creem. Over the past few years, I've turned down numerous sponsorship offers, but this time I was glad to make an exception because Creem is the product I actually use and have been very happy with it. Creem is the Merchant of Record behind iximiuz Labs, handling payments, global taxes, and compliance, so I can focus on building labs instead of fighting VAT forms. Do recommend!

iximiuz Labs gets a documentation section

Didn't see this one coming, but over the past couple of years, the platform has gained so many capabilities that having proper documentation has become a necessity - behold labs.iximiuz.com/docs.

The docs should clear up confusion about whether playgrounds are real VMs or containers (spoiler: they are VMs), provide clear instructions on how to use playgrounds, how to expose HTTP applications running in the playgrounds, how to create custom playgrounds using the UI constructor and the YAML manifests, and cover many more topics.

Ah, and the docs also include two very special sections on how to get started on the platform as a Linux/DevOps beginner and as an experienced server-side engineer.

I only started filling everything in a couple of days ago, so many sections are still incomplete. Luckily, the docs are open source, so if someone feels like writing about their favorite feature, contributions are most welcome!

Content authoring with Claude Code

Good news for content and playground authors. I finally consolidated the content samples and rootfs images repos under the main labs repo. And I also added my battle-tested set of Claude Code rules and skills on how to use labctl for content authoring and challenge troubleshooting.

If you clone the github.com/iximiuz/labs repo and copy the contents of its "content-samples" subfolder into the root of your own content collection, then run Claude Code from it and prompt it to create a new tutorial, challenge, or even a course, it'll nail the format. Of course, Claude Code won't make a great piece end-to-end, but it's very helpful for scaffolding, ad hoc edits, and debugging acting-up init tasks.

New learning materials

The month is only half over, but iximiuz Labs has already gotten quite a bit of new materials published 🚀

A bunch of Linux and Docker/Podman challenges by yours truly:

• ​Linux 101: Archive and Extract Files and Directories with tar​
• ​Linux 101: Install Linux Packages from Remote Repositories (Debian & Ubuntu Edition)​
• ​Linux 101: Install Linux Packages from Remote Repositories (Fedora & RHEL Edition)​
• ​Write a Dockerfile for a Simple Web Server Application​
• ​Make a Container Restart Automatically After Docker Host Reboot​
• ​Make a Container Restart Automatically After Podman Host Reboot​
• ​Gracefully Stop a Container With a Lengthy Shutdown Sequence​
• ​Protect an Unintentionally Exposed Server Port with Firewall Rules​

A few CKAD-styled Kubernetes challenges by Omkar Shelke:

• ​Scale Deployment and Expose via NodePort Service​
• ​Troubleshoot a Website That Is Not Accessible​
• ​Pod, Service, and Cross-Namespace DNS Resolution​
• ​Provision and configure a PersistentVolume (PV) and PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) for deployment​

A couple of well-illustrated eBPF programming tutorials by Teodor Podobnik:

• ​Different Ways to Deliver Kernel Events from eBPF to User Space​
• ​All the Ways to Loop and Iterate in eBPF​

And Márk Sági-Kazár has already published 4 lessons of his Kubernetes The (Very) Hard Way course - check out the latest one, on kube-apiserver 👏

Playground got some QoL improvements

First off, two new kernel versions are now available: 6.12 (LTS) and 6.18 (bleeding edge) - both marked as experimental, but my preliminary testing didn't reveal any issues with them.

Some handy playground aliases were created:

• ​serverlabs.io/p/docker​
• ​serverlabs.dev/p/docker​

And last but not least, the Podman playground now fully supports the rootless mode - many thanks to Shan Desai for contributing a fix.

Call to action

In the end, I also want to share some not-so-good news. The platform's weekly recurring revenue is down by almost 70%. Something happened around Feb 6th, and the revenue steeply declined from the $3,000/week baseline to just about $1,000/week.

This is below the most critical levels, and I cannot really explain what caused it. The new plans (Tinkerer and Content Pack) were introduced on Feb 1st, and for the first few days, there was no noticeable impact on the revenue. It even looked like people liked the change, since sales were split as follows: ~50% of the sales were the complete bundle, ~30% the content-only plan, and ~20% the playground-only pack.

But then it all dropped.

I've already shared the news on X and Discord and have gotten a lot of good advice on what could have caused it and how to improve the situation, with a significant fraction of it already applied.

The main culprit is the discontinued lifetime plan. Since iximiuz Labs' current paying customers are not companies but fellow engineers, not having a lifetime option made expensing the paid membership through the employer's Learning and Development budget rather problematic.

​So, the lifetime option is back again 🎉 And as a temporary recovery measure, I'm also running an unplanned sale to restore the monthly revenue to a sustainable level.

On top of that, the pricing page was significantly redesigned to make it much more digestible, and it now even includes a sample letter you can send to your manager for Learning & Development budget approval.

And here's the call to action: if you find the labs useful, please do tell your colleagues, the manager, and the CTO about the project. iximiuz Labs very much needs proper support from companies whose engineers use the site to upskill 🙏 Thank you!

Wrapping up

That's it for now. Enjoy the new learning materials, and I'm off to prepare the next batch! It's so good to be back at content work 🚀

Cheers

Ivan