You can create custom hands-on labs in Content Engine to help your users learn technologies while practicing on a technology stack that matches your own. Content Engine is available in enterprise accounts. Any user in an enterprise account can create a custom hands-on lab, but only administrators can complete the final step of publishing the lab. 

This article contains the following sections:

• Provisioning the Technology Stack to Match Your Own
• Validation Checks
• Allowed Services
• What's Next

Provisioning the Technology Stack to Match Your Own

While you're creating your custom hands-on labs, you determine the activities users complete while working through the lab by the steps you create. However, provisioning the environment is just as important. The provisioning tab is where you can recreate your own technology stack as closely as possible.

You provision your environment in the Provisioning tab in the last step of the How to Create a Custom Hands-on Lab procedure of the Creating Custom Hands-on Labs article. You can use the provisioning block to create resources when the lab starts so users don't have to manually create everything in the lab. 

Many environments use the following resources, which makes them a good choice to include in your provisioning block:

• CloudFormation (Amazon Web Services)
• ARM Template (Microsoft Azure)
• Deployment Manager (Google Cloud Platform)

Otherwise, you might prefer to create resources manually, use templates available from the drop-down, or find them from another source, such as your company's own GitHub repository.

Tip: To learn more about making provisioning blocks, see these courses in the QA training library:

• Deploy WordPress using CloudFormation
• Deploy and Modify Azure Resource Manager Templates 
• Define and Deploy Resources with Google Cloud Deployment Manager  

Validation Checks

Validation checks are not supported in Content Engine. Contact customer support if you are interested in building labs with validation.

Allowed Services

The following lists show what services are allowed in custom hands-on labs. Contact your customer success manager or support if you need a service that is not on the list.

• EC2
• S3
• CloudFormation
• CloudWatch
• Elastic Beanstalk
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Key Management Service
• Lambda
• Relational Database Service

• Compute Engine
• Kubernetes Engine
• Cloud Monitoring
• Cloud Storage
• Cloud Pub/Sub
• App Engine
• Cloud SQL
• Dialog Flow

• VMs
• VM Scale Sets
• Virtual Networks
• Load Balancers
• Application Gateways
• Web Apps
• Storage Accounts
• Monitor

See Provisioning an Azure Custom Lab for more information.

What's Next

We'd love to hear about what you want to build! For more information or assistance, contact your customer success manager or support.