Hands-on Labs, Lab Challenges, & Lab Playgrounds
Push your skills to the next level in live AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform environments
Meaningful cloud skills require more than book knowledge. Hands-on experience is required to translate knowledge into real-world results. We see this time and time again in studies about how people learn best — doing the actual task is key.
Get quick and easy access to our sandboxed resources using AWS, Azure, Google, Docker, Kubernetes, and much more
Practice working in live cloud environments with guided hands-on labs using our step-by-step procedures
Demonstrate your problem-solving skills on non-guided lab challenges with real-world scenarios
Quickly build practical expertise with hands-on labs and lab challenges — no additional costs, accounts, or setup time.
Hands-on labs are guided experiences to learn in live cloud environments. Build and validate practical experience directly on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Docker, Kubernetes and much more.
Lab challenges are non-guided skill validation to demonstrate problem-solving skills — basically hands-on labs with the gloves off. You jump into an auto-provisioned cloud environment and are given a goal to accomplish. No instructions, no hints. To pass, you’ll have a limited amount of time to complete the checks that inspect the state of your lab environment.
Validate your technical problem-solving skills in a real environment 
Troubleshoot complex scenarios to practice what you learned 
Develop production experience that translates into real-world expertise HOW DO HANDS-ON LABS, LAB CHALLENGES, & PLAYGROUND LABS WORK?
Select a hands-on lab or lab challenge
Click “Start Lab”
Follow the instructions to login with our credentials — and go!
Lab playgrounds provide a safe and secure sandbox environment for you to explore your own ideas, follow along with Cloud Academy courses, or answer your own questions — all without having to install any software on your local machine. You should feel free to take risks and try unfamiliar tools and commands to learn more about working in a live environment — even if it means running into a dead end and needing to start the lab over.
Explore and experiment live environments without a set of objectives or checks to complete
No software installations or account credentials needed — the system automatically launches all the necessary resources
Use for an extended duration with an average duration of four hours Cloud Academy for Enterprise
