Description
In our City Cloud Academy (https://academy.citycloud.com) learning platform, we enable learners to interact with real-world hands-on lab environments, so that they can learn complex technologies like OpenStack, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ceph, Ansible, and others. To do that, we use Apache Guacamole (https://guacamole.apache.org/)'s guacd service to provide learners with interactive shell terminals — or even full desktop environments — that run right in people's browsers, no additional software required.
The Guacamole platform is normally deployed in conjunction with a Java servlet environment (https://guacamole.apache.org/doc/gug/guacamole-architecture.html#web-application) (commonly Apache Tomcat). But the Guacamole protocol is not tied to the Java language in any way, and a Python websocket proxy (pyguacamole (https://pypi.org/project/pyguacamole/)) is readily available under an open source (MIT) license.
In this talk, we discuss how we implemented a learning platform (based on Open edX (https://open.edx.org)) that deploys an ASGI service under Daphne (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/howto/deployment/asgi/daphne/), uses pyguacamole to provide an asynchronous websocket connection to a Guacamole service, and thus creates a highly scalable, interactive, and immersive learning environment that helps people learn complex technology with no hardware or cloud investment at all.
## Slides
The slides (with full speaker notes) are up at https://fghaas.github.io/djceu2021 and https://mrtmm.github.io/djceu2021.