// the find
scottslowe/learning-tools
A collection of tools and files for learning new technologies
A personal learning lab from Scott Lowe (VMware/networking author) containing Vagrant environments, Ansible playbooks, and Pulumi programs for spinning up local or cloud instances of various infrastructure technologies. It's a reference collection, not a library — you clone it, pick the subdirectory that matches what you're learning, and run it. Aimed at ops/infrastructure engineers getting hands-on with tools they haven't touched before.
The Vagrant+Ansible combination is well-suited to local multi-VM topologies — the consul-ansible and etcd cluster setups are realistic enough to actually teach you how these systems behave under failure. The Pulumi examples use Go (not YAML wrappers), so you're learning real infrastructure-as-code, not just config templating. The per-subdirectory README pattern means you can navigate to exactly what you need without reading everything else. The Terraform+Ansible hybrid examples (etcdv3-ansible-aws-tf) reflect how real teams actually combine these tools.
A lot of this is frozen in time — CoreOS is dead, Docker Swarm lost to Kubernetes years ago, rkt is gone, and the ec2.py dynamic inventory scripts predate the AWS collection by several years. The Kubernetes section is thin given how central k8s is to modern infra work: a few CAPI kustomize overlays and a kubeadm Vagrant setup, but nothing on day-2 operations, CNI, or storage. No CI to verify the examples still work, so you have no signal on which environments are currently functional versus quietly broken. The Pulumi examples are all Go, which is fine, but if you're learning Pulumi specifically you probably want the TypeScript or Python SDKs since that's where most community examples live.