Whether if you just get started with Cilium, or if you are experienced but want to dive into a new feature, your first question is probably, “How do I get some hands-on experience first? How can I learn more about these features?” Look no further! We got you covered. Our hands-on labs at isovalent.com/labs are an excellent source to gather hands-on experience and more insights. And today, we are excited to announce badge-based certifications for many of our labs!
So if you have some quiet time on your hands over the holidays and want to invest it in Cilium, try to collect all four badges available right now!
Cilium Hands-On Labs: From Isovalent
We have always had the Getting Started guides for Cilium: The Beginners Guide based on the Star Wars theme is quite popular. These guide you through setting up, installing and working with Cilium. However, some of us prefer the system available immediately to test and experience it.
Thus, we created easy-to-use labs that can be started right out of a browser with the click of a button. Built on the well-known Instruqt environment, the labs feature an individual environment per user, ensuring a hassle-free environment. The labs generally take 30 to 60 minutes to complete, depending on the topic and the knowledge level of the user. They guide you through the tasks and the results are typically checked to validate the progress through the lab.
These labs have quickly become popular in the community and with our customers alike. They not only cover the Getting Started topics, but also advanced topics such as Cilium Service Mesh and enterprise use cases such as security visibility. While many people were leveraging our labs, there wasn’t a way to track progress and share learning experience with others.
Labs certified by Isovalent, the founders of Cilium
Starting today, we are officially offering certified labs to enable users to track and share their learning experience! Whenever you successfully complete a certification backed lab, a corresponding certificate (a Badge) is automatically assigned to your email address. With these badges, you can easily track and share what courses you have already finished and the expertise you have already gained.
Currently, we offer badges in three levels:
- Bronze: These beginner-level labs include topics like installation, base functionality, and give you a great first interaction with Cilium. These are suited for folks who are new to Cilium and want to get a first hands-on experience.
- Silver: These intermediate labs are detailed and focus on a specific feature. These allow folks to dive deeper into specific capabilities of Cilium. These are best suited for those who are familiar with the basic concepts of Cilium and want to dive deeper into a specific feature.
- Gold: These advanced labs focus on complex and enterprise use cases and often span across multiple features.
We have already issued 400 badges during the beta, and every day new badges are issued. Currently, a subset of four of our available hands-on labs are included in the badge program:
- Getting Started with Cilium
- Cilium Cluster Mesh
- Isovalent Cilium Enterprise: Network Policy
- Cilium Service Mesh
For the future we plan to add exams and badges to other existing labs as well. Also:
Cilium is a very deeply technical product. We will continue to expand the topics we cover in these labs and along with it, the certifications as well. If you would like to see a topic covered, please share your feedback here: marketing@isovalent.com
Why Isovalent Certified Labs?
To ensure our content suits your needs in the best way possible, we follow these core principles:
- From the Creators: Our Founders and colleagues are also the creators of the technologies. They have a deep understanding and expertise of the technologies, they support the creation of the lab content, and this reflects in the quality of our labs.
- Focus on real exercises: The focus of the hands-on labs has to be on your understanding of Cilium and how to use the surrounding tooling. We strongly feel that this can best be accomplished via hands-on exams, where a task needs to be completed with the knowledge previously gained.
- Comprehensive, not just cursory, tutorials: Our goal with these labs is to share the knowledge of Cilium. We don’t just have one or two high-level labs, but we dive deep into various features and use cases. We are proud to invest the time to enable everyone in our community to understand and learn all about eBPF and Cilium.
Ready to get started?
We at Isovalent wish you great holidays. Enjoy the time! However, if you have some spare time and if want to learn about Cilium during that time, be our guest: head over to our lab page and complete the labs of your choice:
If you have already completed some of the labs in the recent past, please check your Credly page in the next days: we tried to log who already successfully completed labs with exams, and will issue the badges subsequently where possible.
And if you already run all of our labs, maybe it is time to meet us after the holidays! You will find us at any of our upcoming events.
Roland Wolters is Head of Technical Marketing at Isovalent where he and his team are responsible for communicating the technical value of eBPF, Cilium, and Isovalent Cilium Enterprise to customers, prospects, and partners. His areas of expertise include security, automation, and open source. He is a keen driver of agile processes and would be lost without his Kanban boards. Outside of work, he is usually most remembered for trying to frantically keep up with his rambunctious young triplets.
