I Built a DevOps Simulator to Practice Kubernetes Debugging

Farooq Shabbir — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:18:12 +0000

Most DevOps tutorials have a problem.

They explain things like this:

“Here is what CrashLoopBackOff means.”
“Here is how to fix it.”

But real DevOps work doesn’t look like that.

Real incidents look like this:

kubectl get pods
kubectl logs api
kubectl describe pod api
kubectl get services

You investigate.
You read logs.
You try commands.
You guess.
You debug.

So I built a small DevOps Learning Simulator where you practice debugging Kubernetes incidents like you would in a real environment.

The Idea

Instead of reading solutions, you interactively investigate problems using real commands from Kubernetes.

You run commands such as:

kubectl get pods
kubectl logs <pod>
kubectl describe pod <pod>
kubectl get services
kubectl describe service <service>
kubectl get endpoints

Then you try to find the root cause of the incident.

Example Incident

You start the simulator and run:

kubectl get pods --show-labels

Output:

NAME                          READY STATUS             RESTARTS AGE LABELS
api-deployment-7d4f8b9c       0/1   CrashLoopBackOff        8 36m -
nginx-deployment-5f6g7h8i     1/1   Running                 0 5m app=nginx

You investigate logs:

kubectl logs api-deployment

Then describe the pod:

kubectl describe pod api-deployment

Eventually, you discover the issue:

A missing ConfigMap caused the container to crash.

The simulator then checks your answer and gives feedback.

Current Scenarios

Version 1 includes several common production incidents:

• CrashLoopBackOff caused by missing configuration
• OOMKilled due to incorrect memory limits
• DNS / service selector mismatch

These are problems engineers regularly see when working with Kubernetes.

Why I Built This

Many developers learn DevOps tools but never practice debugging real incidents.

They know commands but haven’t used them in a realistic investigation.

This project aims to address that by providing a safe environment for troubleshooting practice.

Think of it like a flight simulator for DevOps engineers.

Try It

You can try it here:

GitHub Repository

https://github.com/FarooqShabbir/devops_simulator

Run it locally:

git clone https://github.com/FarooqShabbir/devops_simulator.git
cd devops_simulator
python devops_simulator.py

Then start investigating incidents.

Future Plans

Some ideas for future versions:

• CI/CD pipeline failures
• Infrastructure drift debugging
• Network policy issues
• Multi-service production incidents

If you have ideas or want to contribute, feel free to open an issue or pull request.

Feedback

I would love to hear from other DevOps engineers:

What incidents would you add to a DevOps debugging simulator?

Forem: Farooq Shabbir

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I Built a DevOps Simulator to Practice Kubernetes Debugging