When Abby Bangser, Principal Engineer at Syntasso, envisioned a live hackathon showcasing Kratix, she knew it needed to feel real. Real infrastructure. Real tools. Real impact. But she also knew that delivering that experience at scale—during a live event—would be near impossible without the right platform.

Abby teamed up with Phillip Morton, Platform Engineering Lead at The Access Group, to design an immersive, hands-on experience for over 200 workshop attendees at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025. Their goal: let developers explore a bespoke internal platform using Kratix and Backstage—without requiring them to install a single thing.

With Instruqt, they pulled off their session, Tutorial: "Working Code Wins": Win Big With a Cloud Native Hackathon Starter Pack.

The challenge

“We wanted to bring that as-a-service platform experience to KubeCon—and Instruqt made it possible for people to learn and experiment hands-on, just like they would in the real world.”  —Abby Bangser, Principal Engineer at Syntasso

Live events are exciting—but they can also be unpredictable, especially when you're running a hands-on technical workshop in a high-stakes environment like KubeCon. The pressure is real: environments need to work the first time, internet access can be spotty, and attendees show up with every combination of device, setup, and OS. 

Challenges included:

• Eliminating common blockers: firewall issues, install problems, SDK errors, inconsistent setups.
• Supporting over 200 users simultaneously, without spinning up dozens of cloud environments manually.
• Maintaining the flexibility to tweak and improve the experience in real-time during the event.

The Instruqt advantage

“For engineers, we like to break things. The fact we’ve got this virtual machine isolated to you—if you want to delete something, go for it.”  —Phillip Morton, The Access Group

Instruqt enabled Abby and Phill to launch a fully interactive, browser-based lab experience for each participant—complete with Kubernetes clusters and platform components pre-configured and ready to go.

• No local setup required - Environments launched instantly in the browser.
• Isolated sandboxes - Developers could freely explore, break, rebuild, and learn.
• Real-time collaboration - Abby and Phill updated content and flow on the fly.
• Scalable infrastructure - Hundreds of labs spun up with no degradation in performance.
• Developer-first UX - With features like customizable layouts and real-time loading previews, Instruqt made complex tech feel accessible.

The impact

‍“Every time me and Abby were teasing and playing around with it as we were going, we’re like, ‘Oh, let’s add this. Let’s change this.’ And it just works.”  —Phillip Morton, Platform Engineering Lead at The Access Group‍

The hackathon was a hit. Developers quickly grasped core concepts without getting bogged down in technical setup. The self-paced experience allowed for natural discovery, while real-time instructor support made the learning feel personal. Participants could engage with the platform, test out use cases, and even customize their builds—all within an environment that mirrored production systems.

Key results included:

• Estimated 25 minutes of sandbox setup time saved per workshop attendee, by using Instruqt's pre-configured environments.

• 120 hours of live, simultaneous hands-on learning at the workshop, with slides and lab access for continued post-workshop learning

Instruqt’s platform gave the team the freedom to focus on what mattered: creating an experience that showcased the power of modern internal developer platforms in a way that was tangible, intuitive, and fun.

Why Instruqt?

Instruqt stands apart as the go-to platform for delivering hands-on product experiences at scale. Whether for live events, workshops, customer enablement, or technical sales, it offers features like:

• Realistic, interactive labs that mirror production use cases.
• Instant access with preloaded VMs—no setup or dependencies.
• Loading UX for faster time-to-value, reducing wait times.

This isn’t just a sandbox. It’s a platform built to drive developer adoption, accelerate learning, and scale technical experiences—without compromise.

Closing thoughts

The hackathon proved that it’s possible to deliver a high-fidelity, real-world developer experience at scale—without the stress. Thanks to Instruqt, Abby and Phill brought platform engineering to life in a way that was smooth, scalable, and truly hands-on.

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Interested in scaling your next event or workshop like this? Get started with Instruqt — and turn complex tech into unforgettable experiences.