Welcome to the Playground
Explore real infrastructure in secure sandbox environments. Learn distributed systems, container orchestration, and DevOps practices by doing—not just reading.
Secure by Design
All playground environments are completely isolated from production infrastructure. Ephemeral containers auto-destruct after use. No data persists. Play freely.
Choose Your Playground
Each environment offers hands-on experience with real DevOps tools and techniques
Build Swarm Simulator
Watch distributed package compilation in action. See how 70 cores work together to compile Gentoo packages.
- Real-time visualization
- Drone orchestration
- Package queue management
- Failure recovery
apkg Tutorial
Learn Gentoo package management the easy way. Interactive tutorial for the Argo Package Manager.
- Step-by-step guide
- Command examples
- Binhost mode
- Nix integration
Terminal Lab
Connect to a real Alpine Linux container. Run commands, explore the filesystem, and learn CLI basics in a live environment.
- Real LXC container
- Pre-configured tools
- Interactive challenges
- xterm.js terminal
Container Lab
Spin up real ephemeral LXC containers. Choose from multiple lab templates with live terminal access.
- Real containers
- Multiple templates
- Network isolation
- Auto-cleanup (60 min)
Infrastructure Explorer
Explore the dual-galaxy network topology. Discover how systems communicate across sites via Tailscale mesh.
- Network visualization
- System discovery
- Traffic simulation
- Failover demo
IaC Playground
Practice Infrastructure as Code with real Ansible. Provision a container with Ansible pre-installed and a target to configure.
- Real Ansible environment
- Target container
- Playbook examples
- Live execution
Argo OS Experience
Explore a real Gentoo-based environment with portage. Search packages, inspect make.conf, and experience the build system.
- Real Gentoo container
- Portage package tree
- Build system exploration
- Tarn-powered
Networking Lab
Practice networking with interconnected containers. Configure routes, explore DNS, and debug connectivity.
- Multi-container topology
- Routing challenges
- DNS exploration
- Network debugging
Monitoring Lab
Build observability dashboards. Create Prometheus queries, Grafana panels, and alerting rules.
- Metric exploration
- Dashboard builder
- Alert testing
- Log analysis
For Homelabbers
Curious how to build a distributed build system? Want to understand multi-site networking with Tailscale? Explore working examples of infrastructure patterns you can adapt for your own homelab.
What Powers This Playground
Ready to Explore?
Pick a playground and start learning. Everything here is designed to be broken, rebuilt, and explored.