Learning DevOps often means reading documentation, watching tutorials, and memorizing commands. Those resources are useful, but I kept missing one thing: a place where I could interact with the concepts without having to build an entire lab first.
That is why I have been working on Bancada, a free and open source platform for practicing DevOps and system design directly in the browser.
The project is primarily built for Portuguese-speaking developers, especially people who are learning infrastructure and want something more hands-on than another collection of articles.
Bancada currently has 168 practical learning resources:
- 53 games and interactive simulators
- 20 guided exercises
- 44 quizzes
- 27 flashcard sets
- 24 operational checklists
- DevOps roadmaps and interview questions
- Educational terminals for Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, SQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL Some activities simulate systems such as DNS, load balancers, message queues, Kubernetes scheduling, deployment strategies, database replication, rate limiting, CI/CD pipelines, and webhook delivery. Everything runs in the browser. You can explore the platform without creating an account or configuring cloud infrastructure. I have just published the first open source release, v0.1.0, under the Apache 2.0 license. The project includes a PWA, Docker support, GitHub Actions, unit tests, Playwright tests, contribution guidelines, a code of conduct, and a public security policy. The next step is improving the platform with feedback from people who are learning or already working with DevOps. If you try Bancada, I would especially like to know:
- Which simulator or exercise was most useful?
- Which DevOps concept should become interactive next?
- Was anything confusing for someone learning the topic?
- What would make you use the platform during your studies? Contributions are welcome. I have also created a few good first issue tasks for anyone who wants to make a first contribution.
Live platform:
https://bancada-9g8r.vercel.app/
GitHub repository:
https://github.com/victrhugo/bancada
Release v0.1.0:
https://github.com/victrhugo/bancada/releases/tag/v0.1.0
If the project is useful to you, a GitHub star helps other developers discover it. Feedback, bug reports, and contributions help even more.
Top comments (1)
This is a solid scope for v0.1.0 — 168 resources with that mix of simulators, quizzes and checklists is a lot of surface area, and shipping Apache 2.0 from day one is the right call.
Answering from my own angle: I run a small fleet of Docker services on a VPS, and what made DevOps actually click for me wasn't documentation either — it was breaking a load balancer config and having to debug it. So the simulators around DNS, rate limiting and deployment strategies are the layer I'd point people to first. For "which concept next", my vote goes to TLS/certificate troubleshooting or CI/CD pipeline failure debugging — both are things juniors hit constantly and both are hard to practice safely elsewhere.
Question on the educational terminals: are those real PTYs behind a WebSocket (containers spawned per session), or JS-emulated shells? That decision drives most of your hosting cost, and it also changes what learners can do — an emulated shell can't surprise you the way a real
docker pulltiming out does.Curious how you're handling state, too. One gap I keep seeing in browser-only labs is that nothing persists between sessions, so you can't come back to a half-broken environment and fix it — which is half of what real ops work is. Persistent environments plus your webhook delivery simulator would be a killer combo.
Starred the repo, the good first issues are a nice touch. Boa sorte with the launch!