LabAsService offers several lab types. Each has its own menu in the Labs section of the administrator sidebar.
| Lab type | Pages in its menu | How a lab is requested |
|---|---|---|
| Preconfigured | Request, Running Labs, Schedule | You choose an application. It is installed and configured for you |
| Custom | Request, Running Labs, Schedule | You define the servers yourself |
| Hypervised | Request, Running Labs, Schedule | You define the servers yourself |
| Shared | Request, Running Labs, Schedule | You choose one server size, and the trainee count must be a multiple of 4 |
| Wise | Request, Running Labs, Schedule | You define the servers yourself |
| Cloud | Request, Running Labs, Schedule | You choose a cloud provider and ownership |
| Manual | Running Labs | No Request page in the sidebar |
| SaaS | Running Labs | No Request page in the sidebar |
If you need an environment that none of these cover, use Lab Request in the sidebar to send a request for a customised lab. See Lab requests, profile and feedback.
A preconfigured lab comes with the required application already installed and configured, so trainees can practise straight away. Applications you can choose from include Jenkins, Ansible, Kubernetes, Docker, GitLab, Hadoop, JFrog, Nagios, Zabbix, Chef, ELK, Rundeck, Puppet and SaltStack, among others. Each application suggests sensible default servers, which you can accept or customise.
You pick the operating system, size, storage and open ports of each server. You can also add supported applications, programming languages, system tools and tools to each server, and run your own command when the server is created. Custom labs allow up to five servers. The sizes and operating systems you can choose differ slightly between the two types. See Creating a lab.
You configure a single server (instance type, storage, operating system and version, optional software, and ports) rather than adding servers one at a time. The number of trainees must be a multiple of 4. Shared labs offer larger instance sizes, and you can open up to four ports.
The request steps are the same as for Custom and Hypervised: you add servers one at a time.
You first choose the cloud provider. AWS, Azure and GCP are available. Alibaba and Oracle are marked as upcoming. The Schedule and Parameters steps have fewer options than other types, for example billing is budget-based only.
These types have a Running Labs page only. There is no Request or Schedule page for them in the sidebar. Use Running Labs to see the labs that exist.