Skytap - the laboratory is the hard part - Cloud environment platform founded 2006 by university researchers, widely used for virtual training labs.

Skytap was founded in Seattle in 2006 as Illumita, by three University of Washington professors who had researched virtualisation and a graduate student. It provides self-service cloud environments used for development, testing and virtual training laboratories, and was acquired by Kyndryl in 2024.

One line in its own description explains why generic cloud computing was never sufficient for this: its environments support complex Layer 2 and Layer 3 network requirements. A course on virtual machines needs machines; a course on networking needs a topology - broadcast domains, tagged links, routing adjacencies, deliberate failures - and most cloud platforms are built specifically to hide that layer from the tenant.

The laboratory is the expensive half of technical training and the half nobody sees in a course description. Equipment that reproduces a production environment, per student, available at the hour a class begins and destroyed afterwards, is a harder problem than the teaching, and it decides what can honestly be taught at all.

It is also unusual in what it runs. Alongside ordinary servers it supports AIX and IBM i on Power hardware - the systems that keep operating in banks and insurers long after the industry has stopped writing about them. Those environments still need people who can work them, and people are trained where the systems are.

Skytap ↗

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