hands iconHands-on Labs, Lab Challenges, & Lab Playgrounds

Get guided. Get challenged.

Push your skills to the next level in live AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform environments

Build hands-on experience using real accounts on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and more

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.

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Get quick and easy access to our sandboxed resources using AWS, Azure, Google, Docker, Kubernetes, and much more

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Practice working in live cloud environments with guided hands-on labs using our step-by-step procedures

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Demonstrate your problem-solving skills on non-guided lab challenges with real-world scenarios

Zero setup time. Zero extra cost or accounts.

Quickly build practical expertise with hands-on labs and lab challenges — no additional costs, accounts, or setup time.

  • Learn cloud computing completely risk-free
  • Validate practical experience without jeopardizing your live production environment
  • Spend zero time setting up your environment
Zero setup time. Zero extra cost or accounts.

Get guided with hands-on labs

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.

  • Get step-by-step guidance to practice your skills without getting stuck
  • Solidify practical knowledge in a short amount of time
  • Facilitate knowledge retention and enable experimentation
Get guided with hands-on labs

Get challenged with lab challenges

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 icon Validate your technical problem-solving skills in a real environment
Troubleshoot icon Troubleshoot complex scenarios to practice what you learned
Develop icon Develop production experience that translates into real-world expertise

HOW DO HANDS-ON LABS, LAB CHALLENGES, & PLAYGROUND LABS WORK?

It's easy. You just...

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    Select a hands-on lab or lab challenge

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    Click “Start Lab”

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    Follow the instructions to login with our credentials — and go!

Experiment with lab playgrounds

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.

Troubleshoot icon Explore and experiment live environments without a set of objectives or checks to complete
Validate icon No software installations or account credentials needed — the system automatically launches all the necessary resources
Develop icon Use for an extended duration with an average duration of four hours

Cloud Academy for Enterprise

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Give your team the hands-on practice they need — without breaking your production environment

  • Measure baseline hands-on technical expertise and monitor skill growth improvement
  • Build your team’s problem-solving skills and view real-time skills with our powerful Skill Profiles dashboard
  • Validate acquired knowledge with skill reports and our state-of-the-art semantic skill graph technology
Learn more
Enterprise overview - build a competitive edge with the enterprise-grade solution

Accelerate your tech training program with Cloud Academy