Ever wondered how firefighters learn to firefight? After all, it's hardly a skill you can learn on the job. You need to be well-prepared long before you tackle your first conflagration.
That's why trainee firefighters are put through live fire training. Fire services have specialised facilities where wood-fired or gas-fuelled simulators recreate the experience of fighting a blaze. There, trainees enter a smoky, hot simulation with zero visibility.
"Nice story," you might be thinking, "but what's this got to do with cloud engineering?"
The answer is that cloud engineers are firefighters, too. It's just that the fires they put out are digital, not physical.
And like firefighters, they need to be battle-ready long before battle commences. If something breaks, they can't take five to familiarise themselves with the problem. They need to sort it out immediately to spare the company costly downtime.
Firefighters have their live fire training. Cloud engineers have virtual sandboxes and training labs. These are online environments where they can break things safely and learn how to put them back together. In this article, we look at these invaluable training environments.
What is a virtual sandbox?
A virtual sandbox is a virtual environment designed for developers, engineers and IT professionals to test, build and experiment with cloud infrastructure. Crucially, the sandbox is isolated from any live systems, so what happens in the sandbox stays in the sandbox.
As well as being isolated, sandboxes should be secure and are often temporary. They're mostly used for simulating real-world scenarios and running proofs of concept.
They can also be proprietorial. Cloud platforms like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud provide sandboxes specifically for cloud engineers to develop skills relating to those platforms.
The same goes for VMware's training labs, where systems administrators gain hands-on experience with the VMware product suite.
Other kinds of virtual sandboxes include:
- Security-focused sandboxes where users can analyse malicious, unknown or suspicious code in safety.
- Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) sandboxes where developers build, test and scale applications.
- Third-party training labs for training, certification and skill-building. VMware Education Delivery Partners (VEDPs) are an example of this kind of sandbox.
What are the use cases for breaking things safely in a cloud environment?
The principle of breaking things safely has many different applications in cloud computing. Here are five common use cases:
- Testing new features, configurations and code. This can act as a dress rehearsal for deployment with no impact on live systems.
- Cloud skill development. Sandboxes are an environment in which IT professionals can gain hands-on experience with cloud services and virtualisation services. This can help in getting staff ready for certification.
- Project integration and testing. Teams can check the compatibility of different builds before deployment.
- Cybersecurity analysis. Security staff can analyse malware behaviour and carry out tests for zero-day threats.
- DevOps pipelines. Automation, CI/CD and app development can all be explored in safety.
In all these cases, users have the freedom to make mistakes without any risk to existing systems. This makes them a worthwhile investment for companies looking to strengthen their security, production lead times and overall cloud competency.
What is chaos engineering?
"Imagine," writes
Antonio Garcia Martinez in his book Chaos Monkeys, "a monkey entering a 'data center', these 'farms' of servers that host all the critical functions of our online activities. The monkey randomly rips cables, destroys devices and returns everything that passes by the hand.
"The challenge for IT managers," he goes on, "is to design the information system they are responsible for so that it can work despite these monkeys, which no one ever knows when they arrive and what they will destroy."
Chaos engineering is when IT managers voluntarily let the monkey into a simulated environment. Controlled failures, such as server crashes, network latency and database outages, are deliberately introduced into a system. The aim is to identify, test and strengthen resilience against real-world disruptions.
It may sound a little out there, but chaos engineering is a fixture of Amazon Web Services, Netflix, Microsoft Azure and other big corporations.
An example from cloud computing is the practice of terminating random data-receiving pods in a Kubernetes environment. The amount of time it takes for a pod to recover is then recorded as a metric of resilience.
Not all training labs and virtual sandboxes use chaos engineering. However, the two concepts are closely related.
What are the benefits of learning through breaking things safely?
The main benefit of breaking things safely in a training lab or virtual sandbox is precisely that it's safe. To return to our original analogy, it's a way of learning how to fight fire without setting a building ablaze.
There are other advantages. These online environments offer a cost-effective kind of training – one that organisations can work into day-to-day operations and that doesn't require travel or accommodation overheads.
And perhaps best of all from an educational point of view, training sandboxes can be used again and again until users have internalised what they've practised.
Last but not least, virtual sandboxes can be rapidly provisioned and destroyed. This has benefits for everything from threat containment to quality assurance.
It's about building things as much as breaking them, of course. However, the ability to do both in safety is indispensable to cloud computing professionals.
What are VEDPs?
VEDPs are VMware Education Delivery Partners – third-party training providers for the VMware product suite.
These training labs are a great example of cloud engineers learning by breaking things safely. They provide safe sandboxes where software can be deployed and run with no impact on any live systems.
Here at Ascend Cloud Solutions, we provide highly reliable and highly secure lab hosting for
VEDP courses. Are you a VEDP and want to bring your training to life?
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