Blogs

Highlights of NRE Labs v0.2.0 This is a big release with a lot of changes, and many of the changes across the various repositories are tightly coordinated. We’ll provide the full Changelog at the end of this post, but before that, we want to go over some of the highlights for this release, especially those that required changes across multiple repositories: New Lesson - Introduction to StackStorm! We’re happy to introduce a great new lesson.

Welcome to 2019, Network Reliability Engineers! We hope your holiday was relaxing. We wanted to start the new year by getting a new release out, which sets the stage for some new content that’s just around the corner. v0.1.4 is released, and running live on the NRE Labs site! In this release, we focus almost entirely on improving the user experience, specifically in two main ways: Some planned content requires some capabilities in the platform that didn’t quite work yet.

“Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding” - wisely said by the aviation-wizard Burt Rutan. If you take any standard product lifecycle development workflow, you will see that Testing is an integral phase in the lifecycle of product development. However, not many engineers understand the importance of testing their product well enough to ensure that it meets the quality standards. I cannot blame them, because testing sounds like a boring, dull, repetitive task.

This was originally posted on keepingitclassless.net I awoke yesterday to a very crisp Tuesday morning in Portland, Oregon. I had just poured myself a nice glass of Stumptown Nitro cold brew coffee, and wandered upstairs to my office for an 8AM conference call. I joined the meeting, and started going through my usual routine - part of which includes looking at the day’s NRE Labs stats. Here’s what I saw:

We released 0.1.3 earlier this month, and since the production instance of NRE Labs has been running it for a few weeks, we want to catch you up on what’s changed in this new version. This is a very exciting version that includes new features, bugfixes, and importantly - four new courses for you to enjoy! We’ll be writing more detailed blogs on each of these lessons in the near future.

When we launched NRE Labs last month, the feedback was very positive. While it’s still early, we’re really excited about the momentum that’s already building toward building a community around a comprehensive set of automation workflows represented as simple lessons in the browser. On the latest Packet Pushers Priority Queue episode, Derick and I shared how NRE Labs is powered by 100% open-source software, ranging from off-the-shelf software we used for the solution, such as Kubernetes and Apache Guacamole, as well as custom-built software under the Antidote project.