Three updates for anyone building content on cloud accounts in Instruqt:

☁️ Six more AWS services available in sandboxes

Your AWS sandboxes can now use Secrets Manager, Certificate Manager (certificate import), OpenSearch Serverless, Athena, Glue and Bedrock Knowledge Bases. Together they open up a class of workshop that was harder to build before: an AI application backed by a vector store and a knowledge base, with credentials in Secrets Manager and audit data queried through Athena and Glue. The full list of allowed services and regions is in the docs - Read more

🤖New models on Amazon Bedrock and Google Vertex AI

We've added new models. On Amazon Bedrock: Claude Opus 4.5 and 4.6, the Gemma 3 family (4B, 12B and 27B) and Titan Text Embeddings v2, so you can build embeddings and knowledge bases inside your content. On Google Vertex AI: Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite, 3.6 Flash and 3.7 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite (now generally available) and Gemma 4 26B. The full list of available models is in the docs. As before, an account owner enables the AI service in your cloud provider settings. Read more

⏸️ Pausable tracks: now available for cloud resources and containers

You can now pause tracks tracks that combine virtual machines with cloud accounts. And new pause and resume lifecycle scripts run at the moment a track pauses or resumes, so you can stop the cloud resources you provisioned and bring them back when the participant returns – for example, stopping EC2 instances on pause and starting them again on resume. This makes multi-day tracks possible without paying for idle cloud resources in between.

Note that pausing suspends virtual machines; containers, services and cloud accounts stay active unless your scripts handle them - Read more

We've shipped a few improvements we're excited to share. Here's what's new.

📎 Share PDFs and ZIPs in live event chat

Running a live, instructor-led event? You can now share PDF and ZIP files directly in the event chat, alongside the images already supported. It's an easy way to hand attendees reference docs, scripts or supplementary materials – they access the file right from the chat, without leaving Instruqt. Attachments up to 25 MB. Read more.

📊 See your Hotstart pools status at a glance

The Hotstarts page has a new column showing Configured / Ready / Claimed counts for each pool, right next to the Status column. You can see how many sandboxes are configured, ready and claimed without opening every pool, which makes monitoring during an event much quicker.

🔍 Full pool names on hover

Hover over a pool name on the Hotstarts page and the full name appears, so longer names are easy to read in the table. Read more about both improvements for Hotstarts.

⚡ Container-based content starts faster with image caching

We've rolled out container image caching across our infrastructure. A container can now start running while the rest of its image is still downloading, instead of waiting for the full pull to finish. On average, this cuts image pull time by up to 63%. You'll notice the biggest difference on large and complex images, such as a full IDE environment or a database engine. Small, lightweight containers were already quick to start.

Caches are per region, so the first pull of an image in a region runs at normal speed and later pulls benefit. Images with empty or duplicate layers aren't eligible for caching – the docs explain how to check yours. Read more

🎨 A refreshed look – now with light and dark mode

We've been giving pages across the app a visual refresh, including API Keys, Webhooks and the LTI interface, with more pages updated throughout:

Choose Light, Dark or System under Appearance in the account menu at the bottom left of the navigation. This is part of the groundwork as we get ready for the official release of Instruqt Labs 2.0. 🚀

Curious what's coming with Labs 2.0?

There's a lot more on the way. Join us for the hands-on event on September 29th to see it in action.

As an Instruqt customer, you're invited as a VIP. Register with the link below and we'll ship you the 2026 swag kit – canvas tote, insulated bottle, notebook and gel pen, and the holographic Iggy sticker. There are 150 VIP invitations and a limited number of kits, so register asap - sign up here.

Instruqt 2.0 introduces a dedicated Logs page: one live and historical view of everything happening across your Tracks and Labs, instead of checking logs per piece of content.

Filter by severity, content, user, or time range, see activity on a timeline, and follow a single learner's session end to end. Faster answers when you need to unblock someone or debug your content.

Why it matters

• One place for everything, across all your Tracks and Labs
• Faster unblocking during live sessions
• Built for developers and non technical instructors alike

Learn more in the Logs documentation.

Your usage limits now cover both Tracks and 2.0 Labs in one place.

"Track Limits" is now "Session Limits." This is mainly a facelift: the protection you already rely on to guard against runaway usage hasn't changed, it now simply applies across everything you publish, whether it's a Track or a 2.0 Lab, all managed from a single view.

What it is

Session limits are guard rails on how many sessions can be started for a piece of content. Without them, anything public or embedded on a website could be launched an unlimited number of times, running up cost and inviting abuse. Limits cap that across four dimensions: per calendar month, per rolling month, per IP address per hour, and concurrent plays per IP.

It's one system covering both content types. There's a single Session Limits area, and in the management table every piece of content carries a tag showing whether it's a Track or a 2.0 Lab. One page, one set of controls, built for both.

Why it matters

• Protects against runaway usage and cost, for all your content, Tracks and 2.0 Labs alike.
• One place to manage everything. Tracks and 2.0 Labs live together, distinguished by a tag.
• Safe to share widely. Publish or embed content with confidence that there's a ceiling in place.

How it works

Set a team wide default that applies across all your content, then override the limits for individual items when you need to. The management table lists every Track and 2.0 Lab together, with current values and a content type tag for each.

Limits are checked the moment a new session starts. A session that would exceed a limit is blocked, and the learner sees an informative message rather than a raw error.

Key capabilities

• Four configurable limit dimensions: calendar month, rolling month, IP address per hour, and concurrent plays per IP
• A team wide default with per content overrides
• One management table for both Tracks and 2.0 Labs, each marked with a content type tag
• Limits enforced at session start
• A clear, informative message for learners who hit a limit

Good to know

If you know Track Limits, you already know Session Limits. Same protection, same controls, now unified under one name and one view across Tracks and 2.0 Labs.

Access to Instruqt 2.0 appears in your side nav, labelled Labs (Beta). You can create and test labs there right away, alongside your existing content, with roles and permissions carrying over exactly as they are today. Some things are still being built between now and GA on 29 September, so you may hit rough edges. Use this period to get familiar with it and tell us what's working and what isn't. Testing, building, and exploring 2.0 yourself is free, and if you share a 2.0 lab with your own end users, that session is billed the same as any other.

Some of the key changes

The core of the product is there: virtual machines, containers, cloud accounts, secrets, and tabs. Below are some of the changes worth knowing about before you start, though there's more in the product than this, so go and explore.

The navigation has changed

We've updated navigation across the platform. This affects everyone, whether or not you're using 2.0 yet. For full details see the previous post about the navigation in the "What's new" section .

Declare, don't script

Sandboxes used to mean hand-written bash scripts, run in fixed order, with no visibility into how resources depended on each other. Nothing ran in parallel, and a failed step wouldn't stop the rest, so problems stayed hidden until the lab tried to open.

Now, with HCL, resources are declared and reference each other directly. The platform works out the dependency graph, starts independent resources in parallel, and health checks each one before the lab is marked ready.

Version control, built in

Tracking changes used to mean setting up a separate GitHub integration.

Now every lab is version controlled automatically, with full history visible in the product. Labs support branches, so you can hold a dev version or a tailored variant without duplicating the lab, and GitHub integration now handles mono repos and multiple branches.

No more challenges, meet pages

Challenges allowed one validation, always at the end, gating whether you could move on. Quizzes were a separate challenge type entirely. Checking two things meant duplicating a challenge into near-identical copies to work around the limit.

Now it's all one page: instructions, multiple validations, and quizzes together, in whatever order you like, with tabs that persist as you move around.

Building in code

The CLI used to handle pushing, pulling, testing, and validating tracks, but that bypassed version control: changes went unrecorded and could be silently overwritten by changes made in the UI.

Now GitHub integration is the primary path, with git handling push, pull, and history, and the CLI reserved for scaffolding new labs.

Building in the UI

You now get to see a lot more of what was already possible in the product, previously locked behind code. The experience is better for it: edit mode built on version control so changes are safe to try and easy to undo, a visual editor that shows content the way learners will see it, and cmd+k search to jump anywhere in a lab.

What's still to come

There's more landing between now and GA on 29 September, including virtual browser, modules, hotstarts, and the feedback component, and that's just some of it. We'll announce each feature in Slack as it ships, so keep an eye there, and we'll show the finished product live at HANDS-ON.

Getting started

Start here: https://docs.labs.instruqt.com. Feedback on the docs, the product, or anything else is welcome. If you run into a problem, follow your usual support process and mention it relates to 2.0, it helps us triage faster.

Come join us at HANDS-ON to see it firsthand, hear about the new releases, and catch some of the thought leaders in the industry. Sign up here: https://instruqt.com/hands-on#join.

We've reorganized the left hand navigation. Nothing you rely on has disappeared, but a lot of it now lives somewhere more sensible.

Why we're doing this

As we build toward 2.0, the old navigation had grown into a long, flat list under Settings that mixed account level configuration with day to day content tools. The new structure groups things by what you're actually trying to do, and gives us room to keep evolving in a way that stays easy to navigate.

What's new in Content

You'll now see Labs 2.0 alongside Tracks in the Content section. This is where our new lab building experience lives while it's in beta.

Share now covers more ground

A new section: Building blocks

Reporting, split for now

Inside each, you'll also find a new Logs interface. This replaces the old Logs entry under Settings. See the labs documentation for more detail on what's changed there.

Integrations gets its own home

Version control, Webhooks, LTI, and CRM are no longer buried in Settings. They now live in their own Integrations section.

Settings, now just settings

Settings is narrower and more focused: Team, SSO, API keys, and Cloud providers. If it's a global account setting, it's here. If it's something you use while building or sharing content, it's moved elsewhere in the new structure above.

Help, all in one place

A couple of smaller things

From your profile menu, you can now choose a theme. Light or dark, for the night owls. Dark mode is still rolling out and not every page supports it yet, but the new labs creator interface and the Logs page do, with more pages coming in the next few weeks.

Tell us what you think

This is us laying the groundwork for 2.0 and where the product is headed next. If something feels off, or you can't find what you're looking for, let us know. Your feedback on this new structure will directly shape how we refine it.

Recently we've shipped a set of improvements focused on running live, instructor-led sessions, creating better invites, and managing Hot Start pools – plus a refreshed set of best-practice guides. Here's what's new.

Export chat history from live sessions

You can now download the chat from a live session directly from the Live dashboard, so the questions, feedback, and follow-up items your participants share stay with you after the session ends. The download covers both messages to all users and direct messages, including attachments – each with the sender's name and timestamp – and stays available for 30 days after the session. See Analyze activity after the event for details.

Hot Start improvements

We made two changes to make Hot Start pools easier to manage day to day:

• Expiration date and time now show in the Hot Starts overview. The pools table has a new "Expiration date & time" column, so you can see at a glance which pools are about to expire and decide whether to pause, extend, or delete them – right from the overview.
• Clearer guidance on locked fields. A Hot Start pool's Scope and Target type define its structure and are set at creation. A new tooltip now surfaces this directly on the fields at both creation and edit time, making how these settings work clear at a glance. Documentation updated as well.

A richer invite creation experience

Public invite description now supports full rich text formatting: bold, italic, numbered lists, bullet points, and links. That means you can lay out agendas, prerequisites, schedules, and key details in a clear, structured way. The invite creation form has been redesigned to match. The title and description fields now stretch to the full width of the page, giving you far more room to write and review your content as you build the invite.

New updated guides & videos

We've reworked our best-practice documentation for running events and instructor-led training. If you deliver live sessions or manage Hot Start pools, these are worth a read:

• Hot Starts best practices, by event type. Hot Start setup isn't one-size-fits-all – a 50-person live workshop needs a different configuration than an always-on embedded lab. This guide gives pool sizing, provisioning lead time, auto-refill, and cleanup recommendations for each event type: self-paced on-demand training, live workshops, webinars, multi-day training, conference hands-on sessions, booth/expo demos, and single-prospect demos. Each comes with a worked example and the common mistakes to avoid. We’ve also created a video with the recommended setups for every event type.
• Understanding Hot Start settings. If you're setting up a Hot Start pool and aren't sure what each option does, this short video walks through the key settings in the creation flow – what each one controls and why it matters – so you can configure your pool with confidence.
• Workshop best practices, now with a step-by-step checklist. Our workshop guide has been restructured into a clear, phased checklist – pre-event planning (IP limits, Hot Start pre-provisioning), invitations and access control, day-of facilitation, and post-event wrap-up – so you can follow it end to end and not miss a step.
• Running live Instructor-Led Training sessions. A new comprehensive guide to the full ILT flow: getting ready for the session, facilitating the event, troubleshooting, and following up afterwards. It covers the three formats teams run most – on-site, virtual, and conference workshops – with the spe

We've made improvements to the Manage Hot Starts page to help you focus on what matters most.

See Running and Provisioning pools first

When you open the Hot Starts page, you'll now see your Running and Provisioning pools at the top by default - the ones that matter most to your day-to-day. Inactive, deleted, and all other statuses are still available - just use the filter on the page to select the ones you need to add to the view.

Your filter selections now stay put

And once you've set those filters the way you want them, they'll stay that way. Your selections are saved and stay persistent in your session on the device - so you don't have to reapply them every time you come back to the page.

You now have more flexibility in how Hot Starts pools are created. What's new: 

• Scope pools to a specific invite - so only invited users can claim pre-warmed sandboxes;
• Select which tracks in an invite need hot starting and remove the ones that don't;
• Pool by sandbox preset – in the invite-scoped Hot Starts, you can now create one pool that covers all tracks using the same preset, instead of multiplying per track.

This update applies to all newly created pools and invites – existing ones are not affected. Smarter pools, less waste! Check out the updated documentation for the full walkthrough.

We are thrilled to announce the rollout of our new Global Sandboxes (GS) feature for all Instruqt customers. This major update is engineered to deliver a significant performance enhancement for your globally distributed teams and learners.

Up until now, your containers, virtual machines, and website service hosts have been provisioned exclusively in the Europe region. For learners operating across other continents, this distance could, unfortunately, introduce noticeable extra latency when accessing their sandboxes.

Global Sandboxes (GS) is the game-changer, empowering Instruqt customers with the capability to provision these essential resources in the closest geographical region to the learner. Once this powerful feature is activated for your organization:

• For ad-hoc play: We will automatically spin up the sandbox hosts in the optimal, closest region to the learner, guaranteeing a faster, smoother experience.
• For hot start pools: Customers now have the strategic control to configure their pools with the region that is closest to their events or learners' locations. For existing hot start pools, we will initially default to europe_west1; however, you can easily adjust the region to suit your needs.

To confirm if this feature has been activated for your organization, please connect with your Customer Success Manager (CSM), or check for the new region drop-down field when provisioning a new hot start pool or editing an existing one. If you see the option to select a region, your team is ready to benefit from the speed and efficiency of Global Sandboxes!