The challenge
Hackers Academy wanted to deliver practical cybersecurity training. Not just lectures. Real, hands-on experience where students could practice in realistic enterprise environments.
Each student needed access to a dedicated environment containing multiple Windows and Linux servers. The labs intentionally needed specific misconfigurations, legacy components, and vulnerable configurations so students could practice cybersecurity techniques in controlled settings.
The requirements were demanding. Each lab had to launch independently and on demand. Be completely isolated from other students' environments. Start from a predefined and repeatable configuration. Shut down automatically when inactive. Be completely terminated after a predefined period or when allocated credits were consumed. Integrate with the company's main learning platform. Remain cost-efficient despite the potentially large infrastructure footprint of each lab.
Building such an environment required expertise across cybersecurity, Windows Server and domain environments, Linux, cloud infrastructure, automation, and DevOps. Manual provisioning took hours. Keeping expensive infrastructure continuously running was not cost-effective. The training team needed a solution that worked at scale.
Our solution
We designed a fully automated cloud lab platform. Complex training environments could be created, launched, controlled, monitored, and terminated programmatically.
HashiCorp Packer built reusable infrastructure images with predefined packages, services, configurations, and intentionally designed lab conditions. AWS CloudFormation provisioned complete multi-server lab environments consistently and on demand.
An administration portal provided operational visibility across active environments, allowing the training team to manage labs, check environment status, and retrieve connection information. Direct integration with AWS using the SDK provided reliable programmatic access to infrastructure components.
We implemented automated lifecycle controls to shut down unused resources and terminate environments after predefined usage limits. Strict environment isolation ensured each student received a separate training infrastructure. APIs integrated with Hackers Academy's primary learning platform, allowing student activity to trigger lab startup and shutdown automatically.
We introduced GitOps principles into the lab management workflow. Using GitHub as the configuration source, the project owner could independently add scripts, configuration changes, packages, and lab customizations without requiring our engineering team to manually modify the platform for every new training scenario.
This transformed the solution from a collection of infrastructure scripts into a self-service internal platform tailored to Hackers Academy's training model.
Results
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Lab provisioning time | Reduced from hours to less than 15 minutes |
| Infrastructure efficiency | Eliminated expensive always-on infrastructure |
| Cost control | Automatic shutdown and termination of unused resources |
| Self-service | Training team can customize labs independently via Git |
Business impact
Hackers Academy can deliver advanced hands-on cybersecurity training without the operational cost and complexity of manually maintaining dedicated lab environments.
Instead of choosing between slow manual provisioning and expensive always-on infrastructure, the company gained an automated, reusable, secure, and self-service training platform capable of creating complex enterprise-like cybersecurity environments in minutes.
The architecture gave the training team greater independence. New lab configurations and learning scenarios could evolve without continuous infrastructure engineering support. The platform scaled with the business, not the other way around.