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.