Project Roadmap

For long term project plans see the project roadmap included in the project source code.

Details of more immediate plans are listed below.

Upcoming changes

Note that the following features are deprecated and the current plan is that they will be removed sometime in the 3.X series of Educates releases:

  • The classic renderer for workshop instructions (Markdown and AsciiDoc) will be removed. All workshops should be ported over to use the Hugo (Markdown) based renderer.

  • The older mechanism for downloading workshop files by specifying spec.content.files in the workshop definition will be removed. The vendir based mechanism for workshop files should be used instead.

  • The Octant web console for viewing and interacting with a Kubernetes cluster will be removed. The standard Kubernetes dashboard should be used instead.

  • The use of profile.d files has been supersed by adding environment variables to the WORKSHOP_ENV file from setup.d scripts. Support for profile.d files will be removed to more easily allow the set of shell scripts used to initialize a workshop container to be re-implemented as a standalone Go application. Workshops should switch to setting environment variables from setup.d scripts.

  • Support for deploying Educates to a Kubernetes cluster which uses Pod Security Policies will be removed.

  • Supply of Carvel repository packages for Educates will be stopped. You will still be able to install Educates using Carvel packages using supplied App resource definitions, but the PackageRepository resource type which bundles access to multiple versions will go away. This is being done because in-place rolling updates of the Educates version isn’t always feasible and it is always recommended to install from scratch rather than upgrading.

  • The skaffold command line tool will be removed. If this is required for a specific workshop it will need to install it as part of workshop setup.

  • The buildah command line tool has been included for some time but is believed to be non functional due to limitations in most Kubernetes environments. If this is confirmed it will be removed.

  • The name of the workshop session UNIX user will be changed from eduk8s to a name not linked to the project name. Workshops should use ~/ or $HOME/ in file system paths where possible, but may need to change paths where anchors for home directory cannot be used.

Other notable changes intended to be made with version 3.X of Educates are:

  • The ability of the educates CLI to install Educates and also create a local Kind Kubernetes cluster for hosting Educates is being overhauled. The experience will be similar, but the requirement for kapp-controller to exist in the Kubernetes cluster is being removed. The kapp-controller package will still be able to be optionally installed as it may still be required by workshops that depend on it. The CLI will also support opinionated installs of Educates to IaaS providers such as AWS, GCP and Azure.

  • First class support for OpenShift will be added back into Educates after having previously been removed. This will include support for using the OpenShift web console embedded as a dashboard tab, and RBAC for commonly used OpenShift specific namespaced resources.