Running hands-on courses for hundreds of students used to be an endless pain - local installs, misconfigured laptops, and lab PCs without sudo rights. To fix this, we built K8shell, a Kubernetes-native platform that provisions isolated workspaces as pods, and with course-specific images. Students connect through our secure SSH proxy, seamlessly just using VS Code, IntelliJ, or SSH CLI.

Deployed in a university datacenter, K8shell serves 300+ workspaces each semester. Similar in spirit to GitHub Codespaces, it brings the same developer experience to self-hosted, controlled environments. We’ll share how we built a secure multi-tenant setup with RBAC and network policies, on-demand workspace provisioning, and managed diverse course workloads: from CPU-intensive ML labs to I/O-bound system exercises. Although we developed K8shell to improve our teaching experience, the same architecture can power any development workload - flexible, secure, and accessible from any IDE.