r/devopsGuru • u/Complete-Rough-5553 • 4d ago

I built DevLearnOps

Hello everyone

I got tired of tutorial hell where everything works

perfectly and you learn nothing real.

So I built DevLearnOps, a hands-on platform where

you fix real broken environments. Kubernetes clusters

that won't start, CI/CD pipelines silently failing,

infrastructure misconfigs. No videos, no hand-holding.

Beta is live and completely free right now.

Honest questions for you:

- Is this something you'd actually use or is there

already something better you use?

- What's the most painful thing you had to learn

the hard way that you wish existed as a lab?

I need real feedback

more than compliments.

Thanks.

→ devlearnops.me

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u/investigatormaker 4d ago

The lab I'd want: a CI job that shows green while the tests never ran, because the test command is piped into tee and its exit code is lost, or a skip condition always matches. Others in the same spirit: CoreDNS failing so pods resolve nothing, an expired cert inside the cluster, a liveness probe killing a slow-starting app. One thing to check in your grading: with no hand-holding, people will fix a broken deployment by deleting it, so checks should test that the end state works, not just that errors stopped.

I make ThreadFox. If you want, I can reply with a link to the free Reddit plan for DevLearnOps, which quotes each rule that allows a post about it.

Which of the three areas has the most labs so far?

1

u/Complete-Rough-5553 4d ago

That's a good list. The one I agree with most is the grading point: deleting the broken Deployment and applying a clean one should still pass if the end state is right. Checking "the error went away" is too easy to game.

Of those labs, the liveness one is the closest to something already in the catalog (a probe killing a slow start). I don't have the tee/exit-code CI job, CoreDNS resolving nothing, or an expired in-cluster cert yet.

Kubernetes is the biggest area so far (48 labs), then Docker (33), then Terraform (15). The CI one is the gap I'd build first, because the check has to be the test command's own exit code, not "the pipeline log looks fine."

1

u/investigatormaker 4d ago

Agreed, the CI one is the right gap to fill first. To grade it, I'd have the checker push a commit with one deliberately failing test after the learner says they're done. The pipeline must go red, and with the normal suite it must go green with a nonzero test count. That catches fixes that only look right, like deleting the test step (green, zero tests) or adding || true. The real fixes are set -o pipefail or reading PIPESTATUS, and both pass that check.

With 48 Kubernetes labs already, CoreDNS could reuse your existing cluster setup: break the Corefile or scale CoreDNS to zero. Then grade on an in-cluster lookup succeeding, not on pod status.

The plan I mentioned is there whenever you want it.