Endpoints

A foundational concept within Antidote is the ability to run the software or appliances needed to educate the learner about a particular topic. It's nice to have lesson guides that walk through a concept, but the whole point of the Antidote project was to provide that ease of use without sacrificing any of the interactivity that comes with being able to play with the tech directly.

At its core, an Endpoint is simply a Docker container that is built to run some software. This could be a simple Bash/CLI environment, it could be a web server, or even a full-blown network device. While the technical implementation of these endpoints is done by Images, Lessons refer to these Image through Endpoint definitions as described here. Bottom line, if you want the user to interact with something in your lesson, you need Endpoints.

Generally, Endpoints are configured within the :ref:lesson definition <lessons> file, lesson.meta.yaml, which can be found at the root of any lesson directory. Within this file, Endpoints are declared under the endpoints key, like so:

endpoints:
- name: linux1
  image: antidotelabs/utility
  presentations:
  - name: cli
    port: 22
    type: ssh

- name: vqfx1
  image: antidotelabs/vqfx-snap1
  configurationType: napalm-junos
  presentations:
  - name: cli
    port: 22
    type: ssh
  additionalPorts: [830]

A few points about the above:

• The name field is up to you to define - you can call each endpoint whatever you want, provided all endpoints

  have a unique name.

• The image field is a DockerHub-compatible image reference, which is passed directly to the underlying Kubernetes infrastructure to run your image. See here for more information on images.

• The configurationType field is optional, and allows you to specify what kind of automatic

  configuration should be done for this endpoint. See here for more information on endpoint configuration.

• The presentations field is also optional, and allows you to specify ways that this endpoint should be presented to the user. This could be a CLI terminal, or even a web application with it's own tab. See here for more information on endpoint presentations.

• The additionalPorts field allows you to specify any additional ports that should be opened for this endpoint. By default, only the ports listed in a presentation are opened. So, this field allows you to directly specify ports that should be opened regardless of the presentations that are configured.

Health Checks

In order to know if a lesson is running, Syringe will perform health checks on endpoints based on each endpoint's configured presentations field. By default, for every Presentation, Syringe will perform a basic TCP connection periodically as a heartbeat to ensure that these presentations are accessible. This means that each endpoint must be able to provide connectivity on every port opened by a Presentation.

Some endpoints may not have any Presentations - in this case, the additionalPorts field is required, and must have at least one port configured. Syringe will then use the first port in this list to perform a health check, and will mark the endpoint as healthy.

Once all endpoints are viewed as healthy, based on these health checks, the lesson will move into the configuration stage, or if no configuration is necessary, will move directly into the Ready state, so that the web front-end can start offering the content to the learner.