Show HN: Magic Sandbox – hands-on Kubernetes training on real infra | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Magic Sandbox – hands-on Kubernetes training on real infra

msb.com

180 pointsmstipetic39 comments

Wow this is great! I've been meaning to play around with k8s and this looks to be a good first time experience with the subject.

I had a difficult time trying to figure out how to use the text editor to open a file and was stuck on a particular step for a bit. Would be nice to give users a quick intro on the basics of the UI.

Good luck!

Definitely a lot more work to be done to polish up the ux! Thanks for the compliments and thanks for pushing through the issues

No worries!

Okay, honestly this is great. The content, flow, and ramp-up in complexity is wonderful.

Please, please, please add a way to resume your learning session without starting over from scratch. I didn't click on "Start next class" once and was booted out to the main menu. There seems to be no way to resume my "next class" without restarting the entire module. Once you have this, I'll be a paying customer.

We have this on the roadmap, but it's not as trivial as it seems, since there's a real cluster behind and it's very opinionated

Pretty good platform for learning k8s. Nice UI, clear explanations. Of course my "inner QA engineer" came out and I had a few observations:

* On the intro page about typing "kubectl delete <item1> <item2>", autocomplete only worked for <item1> and I had to manually type <item2>

* Whenever I clicked "Check" button after running a command to go to the next task, I would lose focus on the CLI window and would have to click back into the window. It would be nice to have <ctrl-Enter> be an alias for clicking that "Next|Check|Start Tasks" button.

* I clicked "Previous" to scroll back thru one of the lessons, and the state of the cluster didn't roll back, so to reproduce something I had to start from the beginning of the tasks. This would probably be difficult to make "Previous" a real-Undo function, but it would be cool. Kind of like "upgrade/downgrade" when using SQLAlchemy to manage a database.

* When on the page asking me to type "kubectl describe deployment", the auto-complete would always jump to "deployment.app" instead of stopping that the command parameter "deployment"

* For viewing the details about the dashboard elements on the right hand diagram, the slide out showing the metadata, etc. would only change between objects when clicking on just the title in the object's box. There's no visual signifier that the title is any more important than the rest of the object's widget for selection. Maybe allow clicking on anything inside an object's frame instead of just on the text of the object's title?

* on the "/deploy-an-application" lesson, the introduction page is highlighting the wrong elements in the YAML when you hover over the anchors in the description text

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I guess these are all more-or-less nitpicks in what looks like a really well polished experience for learning k8s. It's nice enough that it sucked me in to spending a half hour going through it and sending back these suggestions :)

Good luck with the product. I'll pass along a pointer to our k8s guy.

Oh wow, this is the best comment we could have gotten! Thank you! Still a lot of work to do definitely

Thank you for such a great feedback. Undo/redo - this is gonna be super-tricky to build, but we had similar ideas, mostly we were thinking about smth like redux'ish time travelling along the cluster state updates, slow-mo replays, things like that. But undo/repo over real cluster states is definitely an interesting idea.

Am I being stupid or is the terminal window not responding to typing?

edit: my bad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21283632

Are you using chrome? We can occasionally have some issues on some browsers. Sorry to hear that. A refresh will probably help

Firefox, but it's happening in both browsers I try.

edit: Apologies, it was due to my work's restrictive proxy that stopped several components from loading.

Awesome! Yeah websockets can be tricky in some environments

Like really? You are optimizing your product for (google's spyware) chrome? You are part of the problem.

"some issues in some browsers" - shouldn't fly in 2019, IE6 is gone!

Yeah, I'm super sorry, but there's 3 of us working on the whole frontend so it's not always easy. we're doing our best to support everything as much as possible

This is just a small company getting off the ground and you're going to bash them because they don't support every single browser that exists? Seriously, cut them some slack.

Feedback loop is extremely important, especially when the product is young. To grow, you need to learn and perfect your abilities same applies to software and companies. I did not leave that comment out of malice, I shared an important market feedback.

I think there are better ways to get that point across than opening with the tone of "Like, really?"

Looks awesome! I am a complete beginner in Kubernetes (even in automated container deployment), but wants to learn it. Will I be able to understand the basics of it using msb?

Yes! Our goal is to take you from a beginner not knowing what a Pod is to doing advanced deployments. You do however require basic knowledge of how servers or backend technologies work

Great! Looking forward to try it.

Since I'm teaching Kubernetes I'll definitely take a deeper look into it. Recently I tried RedHat Labs, but unfortunately these resources were not lasting (only available for 2 months, which is not good if your students start the lab over the course of 6 months...)

Great! send me an email at mislav at <this-domain> and I'm happy to walk you through and discuss future plans

Great platfom. If you want to learn/understand kubernetes, this is the right place to do it.

thank you!

Yes, congrats on relaunch! I'm on Brave and get this message when trying to "login with google" - shields down and 3rd party cookies enabled.

"This browser is not supported or 3rd party cookies and data may be disabled."

Are you getting it at the google sign-in popup? That's out of our control unfortunately

I'm getting it as an alert on msb.com. However I already created an account with email, and it works great!

Your "Magic dashboard" looks great! This UI looks so refreshing. It would be great to use it to monitor own clusters.

We are thinking of spinning it off as a separate monitoring tool later, but for now we're focusing on the teaching aspect. Thank you very much!

This is so good looking, cute UI, smooth flow. Clear explanations at lessons and convenient coding. I think that's perfect place to learn K8S, even for complete beginners.

Thank you very much!

Are you planning to work on accessibility? It's pretty bad and much can be improved. I can help if needed, I'm my hn username at Google's mail service.

will email you, thanks!

what are differences between msb and katacoda?

We think katacoda is great! I'd say our two major differences are the interactive visual layer representing the real time state of the system, as well as having much more advanced content. Our main content developer is Nigel Poulton, the author of The Kuberentes book, and our goal is to cover the whole of k8s in the next few months

I did pop over and take a look at katacoda (which is also a pretty cool platform I didn't know about before, thanks for the tip!). Walking thru the first couple steps of their getting started with k8s, if I hadn't already been thru what I'd done on MSB theirs would have been a lot more confusing :)

I totally agree that the interactive visual layer was a huge bonus for my understanding, and the ordering and transparency of what the commands do in the intro lesson on MSB was a lot better. That said, katacoda seems to have a much broader focus on many more technologies.

Our hypothesis is that we should go super deep and focus on one technology before thinking about something else, and this is the mistake that other vendors are doing. We see msb doing deep dives in things like relational databases, elasticsearch and rxjs in the future, but doing it properly one step at a time

Hi, I registered before and used it. I am a solo developer, will I be able to use the training for free?

We have a large free tier to teach you the basics of kubernetes, definitely

Glad to know. Thanks for your reply. It’s awesome. Really like it.

When we cross the free tier, is it one time fee? Or month by month?

Currently we're having an early access fee for one year. As I said in another post, we have Nigel Poulton, the author of The Kubernetes book, developing the content, so we're hoping to cover the whole of kubernetes in the next few months, and we're very serious about the quality of the content there

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