Codefresh Creates a Hands-on Environment to Educate Customers on New Technologies

Customer Overview

Codefresh (acquired by Octopus Deploy in February 2024) is an Argo maintainer and leader in Kubernetes CD, GitOps, and CI. Based in California, Codefresh designed and built the first Kubernetes native CI/CD platform for modern applications and ushered in the GitOps revolution with the first enterprise continuous delivery platform powered by Argo. 

Codefresh’s customers include DevOps teams from GoodRx, Monday.com, and Deloitte, who rely on their technology to safely and scalable deploy software.

Challenge

“We have seen many people asking questions about Argo CD. The same questions come up again and again. Instead of explaining what Argo CD is a thousand times, we created a training and certification to educate people on Argo and GitOps,” — Kostis Kapelonis, Senior Developer Advocate at Codefresh.

Argo CD is a Kubernetes-native continuous deployment (CD) tool. Unlike external CD tools that only enable push-based deployments, Argo CD can pull updated code from Git repositories and deploy it directly to Kubernetes resources. This allows developers to manage infrastructure configuration and application updates in one system. Argo CD is one of the fastest-growing tools in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) landscape.

To help customers learn about Argo CD, Kostis and his colleagues first tried to improve product documentation, but they soon found the documentation had its limitations. CNCF offers some training in this area but lacks Argo CD-specific content. Kostis and his team sought out a solution that could provide a live workspace where learners can get hands-on with the technology.  

Solution

Codefresh chose Instruqt to power its GitOps Argo CD training and certification program for its ease of setup, flexibility, and robust analytics:

• Ease of setup - Setting up Kubernetes is complex and challenging for new users, and Codefresh quickly provided pre-configured environments with Instruqt. The platform automatically creates the Kubernetes environment on-demand and tears it down after the training, saving hours of setup time.
• ‍Intuitive web interface - By creating the course content on Instruqt in a standard web browser, learners don’t have to worry about firewall restrictions, incompatible devices, or security software that prevents their software from running.‍
• Technical flexibility - Codefresh easily defined lab environments custom-tailored to what they wanted learners to be exposed to and for how long.‍
• Actionable insights - Kostis and his team ran check scripts to get instant feedback on the quality of each course and monitor how learners progressed through the training. 

Results

Within three months, Codefresh reached a milestone of 1,000 certified learners with overwhelmingly positive feedback about the hands-on lab experience. Kostis and his Developer Advocacy team achieved their goals of educating the community on new technologies. The sales team was also happy their customers were trained and certified on the latest technologies.

“Our customer support team thinks it’s a great idea to use Instruqt to educate customers. Other departments in Codefresh also want to use Instruqt for onboarding our new employees,” — Kostis Kapelonis, Senior Developer Advocate at Codefresh.

With the success of this training program, Codefresh looks to expand its usage of Instruqt by creating part two of the certification curriculum, finding new ways to improve the whole customer journey, and refreshing the internal employee onboarding experience. Check out the training program here.