/about
Built by educators and engineers
who've lived the problem.
our story
Testbed started with a simple frustration: too much class time gets lost to broken lab environments instead of actual learning.
We're a group of academics and engineers based in Australia. After years teaching a range of technical units at major Australian institutes, it became clear to us that the tools available for hands-on labs hadn't kept pace with how people actually learn today. Individuals/students were losing the first twenty minutes of every prac to VM installs, driver issues, or laptops that simply couldn't run the software. Instructors were spending their office hours doing IT support instead of teaching.
On top of that, the sheer variety of operating systems — Windows, macOS, Linux — and laptop hardware — Intel, Apple Silicon, Snapdragon, and more — meant institutes had to build and maintain multiple versions of the same VM just to cover one unit. Individuals/students were often left buying new laptops just to run a provided VM, or resorting to clunky emulation workarounds to get an unsupported image running on their machine at all.
Testbed is the platform we built to fix that — real virtual machines, ready in a browser tab, so the only thing standing between an individual/student and the lab is a single click.
what we believe
Our principles
Learning should happen in real environments.
Simulations only get you so far — the goal is hands-on skills that transfer to the real world.
Setup time is wasted time.
Every minute spent fighting infrastructure is a minute not spent learning.
Instructors shouldn't have to be sysadmins.
Building and running labs should take minutes, not a semester of trial and error.
where we're headed
Our vision is to help close the gap between Australian institute graduates and industry expectations. Too often, students finish their studies having read about the tools and techniques used in the real world without ever genuinely working with them. We want to change that by making hands-on, practical learning so smooth and low-friction that institutes are motivated to build more of it into every Information Technology related subject — not less, because setting it up becomes easier, not harder. The better the practical experience, the more industry-ready our graduates become.