I started working with Red Hat’s ‘Labs as a Service’ offering (officially called ‘Red Hat Enterprise Linux Skills Workshops‘) a couple days ago, & so far I’m fairly impressed. If you’re not familiar with that, it’s essentially a site that enables a user to connect to a live RHEL environment & run commands to achieve a defined objective. Interestingly enough, the user is not limited to just the list of commands defined in the lab’s text, I ran a few extraneous commands (checking the system’s date & time, etc.) and the system happily produced the appropriate output.
The most recent lab that I completed is titled ‘Configure the system-wide cryptographic policy‘ which is related to vulnerability-remediation work that I’ve performed recently. Labs are broken down into manageable sections – if I remember correctly the lab mentioned above consisted of roughly six “pages”. And while you’re able to copy & paste the commands if you like, the commands are not explained in any real detail (that’s what the documentation is for, right?). There’s even an ‘Open’ lab without any defined objective for those who want to work on their own objectives, although that lab is time-limited to 30 minutes.
I have to give a LOT of credit to the Red Hat team that made this a reality, because opening up even a single interactive system to unknown systems comes with a HUGE number of security concerns. (I can only imagine how much time was spent in meetings, testing, etc.!) However the payoff for all of this work is that now anyone who wants to refresh their memory on how to perform a process or improve their skill level can simply connect to the site, wait just a couple of minutes for the environment to be created, & start running commands! (Also – while the environment is being created, the Red Hat team included messages like ‘Carefully coloring each pixel’ and ‘The hamsters are on a tea break’.)
Prior to this, if I wanted to do something comparable in my homelab, I would need to power on my ESXi server, boot up an existing Linux server (or create a new one), connect to the Linux server, maybe I would even need to install and/or configure one or more software components, and only then would I be able to actually start working through whatever objective I had set. You can probably see how much easier the RHEL Lab environment makes it.
If you’re interested in Linux, I recommend that you check it out.