A bit of an unusual email today, but bear with me.

TL;DR After running into the CKA pricing page for one more time, I decided to reconsider my "life choices." The all-inclusive lifetime premium plan will be going away by the end of this year. However, this is not necessarily bad news - read on!

Today, a single CKA/CKAD/CKS exam costs $445, and the cert is valid for only two years. No learning materials are included in this price - if you want to add some on top, the price jumps to over $600 for one year of access. At the same time, I've been offering in-depth learning and practice materials, along with a variety of polished Linux, Docker, and Kubernetes playgrounds, for a one-time fee of $250. And this is the price before the PPP discount, which can go as high as 60-70%, depending on the region.

The iximiuz Labs lifetime access price has remained unchanged since the start of sales, approximately two years ago, but the platform's capabilities and content collection have grown a lot. Several people suggested that I increase the price to reflect the higher value (and also bring it closer to other market prices), but while I appreciate the feedback, it would only be a unilateral win, and I've been looking for a win-win solution.

My current goal with the platform is three-fold:

• Make iximiuz Labs a sustainable business
• Keep the platform affordable in all regions of the world
• Start paying great authors and accelerate content production

Ultimately, it all boils down to generating more revenue through membership sales - I can only burn through my savings for so long, and with the current numbers, I'm in no position to compensate other authors for even a fraction of their time.

So, here is what I came up with.

With iximiuz Labs' offerings expanding, a single premium plan cannot accommodate everyone: some people are only interested in Docker (or Linux, or Networking) learning materials, others aim to upskill in Kubernetes, and some get a premium membership mainly for the playground, content publishing, or instructor-led training features.

Thus, the solution for generating more revenue is not a price increase but serving a wider audience, potentially at a lower price.

How? Through a higher granularity of access plans.

There will be no immediate changes to pricing or membership plans. However, once I complete the hands-on Docker roadmap (doubling the content's value) and implement playground persistence (doubling the usefulness of the playgrounds), I'll revise the way students can access the platform's functionality and learning materials.

The rough idea is to split the current all-inclusive premium membership plan into:

• Base premium membership (bigger & longer playgrounds, progress saving, full Internet access, etc.)
• Premium content access (with the Docker roadmap likely becoming the first such piece)

This will allow me to keep the current premium membership price unchanged or, hypothetically, even decrease it (still need to finish my back-of-the-envelope calculations), and let people choose exactly what they want to pay for (so you don't bear the costs of, say, Docker roadmap access if you care only about Kubernetes content, or vise versa).

I expect this change to happen by the end of 2025 - just enough time for me to finish the Docker roadmap and Playgrounds 3.0.

Of course, all existing premium members (or those who choose to become a premium member before the change goes live) will retain their full "all-inclusive" access forever.

A deal is a deal, and it's my way of expressing my appreciation to the early adopters who chose to support iximiuz Labs during the platform's most critical development period.

Now off to the actually valuable part of the email!

Márk Sági-Kazár has just published a tutorial on the intersection of containerization and orchestration topics. You've probably heard that Kubernetes doesn't run containers directly - it delegates this task to a container runtime such as containerd, CRI-O, or even Docker, utilizing the Container Runtime Interface (CRI).

If you want to learn how exactly Kubernetes does it, when to use which container runtime and why, and how to run multi-runtime workloads leveraging RuntimeClass-aware Pod scheduling, check out Márk's tutorial: Kubernetes: Runtime Class.

Speaking of accelerating content production, while I'd like to spend more time writing about Kubernetes (and other tech) myself, I'm clearly not keeping up with everything - the Docker roadmap alone is a huge undertaking, and I need to run the platform, fix bugs, ship features, and whatnot. Márk is one of those great authors I'd love to have writing exclusively for iximiuz Labs - his writing is always clean and well-balanced, and he might be even more meticulous in his content work than I am. And it's in your power to make it happen.

Thanks!

Ivan