I am a bit disappointed by the newly updated course structure for AU294 so, inspired by a quick discussion with Jacqueline Sell during one of the last instructor conferences I have decided to let my curiosity loose, at times rhetorically, just to do a reality check with the curriculum developers:

So let's unpack the AU294 and here are some things I'm curious about: 

0. The Dev Containers extension for VS Code enables you to run your entire development environment inside a container.

This opening line in Chapter 1 is not entirely true, as the VS Code IDE itself does not, quite obviously, run inside a container. Also this would not be true even for the containerized code-server as it does not currently support dev containers:

The 'Dev Containers' extension is not available in Visual Studio Code for the Web. Click 'More Information' to learn more.
 
So to speak literally, the newly introduced concept of devcontainers is only partial as it seems. Are we aiming aiming towards full containerized development environment in near future?
 
1. I would like to understand better why does AU294 portray all this setup complexity immediately in Chapter 1 Sections 3-4 without actually demonstrating the long-term benefits of the whole setup nowhere later in the curriculum? Would it have a negative impact on the course to introduce all the components gradually throughout the week?
 
2. Specifically, I wonder why does the AU294 not speak about Podman as drop-in replacement for Docker through already-prepared system packages like podman-docker and instead puts the contextual workload on the delegates on the very first day by guiding them through the VS Code point-and-click setup, to replace the docker references with podman manually?
 
3. Although I personally appreciate the existence of Gitea on the AU294 lab setup, I am curious why (except demonstration) do the Sections 3-4 also rush to squeeze in the point-and-click Git setup, that is almost never used later down the book except on the  comprehensive-review1? Would a later introduction of Git , say on Chapter 8 make any negative impact on the curriculum?
 
4. As a matter of fact, almost all exercises except the one that is noted in PTL-16132 can be also done using the command line. The list of unique commands executed inside a devcontainer development environment throughout AU294 is as follows: * ansible-navigator

• ansible-galaxy
• ansible-vault
• curl
• ssh
• cp
• chmod
• mkdir
• ls
• cat
• echo

That leaves an instructor with a question relevant to my remark #1 - aside from the quick installation of ansible-navigator (through pip install ansible-navigator) - what other benefits and command line tools does the devcontainer development environment introduce to the learning environment that are not readily available on the student's workstation? I understand the commands used in the exercises fall into two categories - basic UNIX commands and tools from the ansible-core package (which except for the Navigator are available on workstation). None of the exercises even run ansible-lint directly in the devcontainers to remind that such thing exists as a CLI.

5. At times, the complexity that is taught in one course is unpacked only during a different training. Is there any other learning material that is (partially) moving away from the command line and would rather later on leverage on the point-and-click takeaways from AU294?

6. The troubleshooting chapter has been squashed into one exercise chapter 2 so early in the training. This only exercise is guided and there is no particular learning except for copying and pasting associated with this exercise. Troubleshooting used to be one of the most fun parts of RH294. 

7. Instead of leveraging "lab solve", all the lab solutions are immediately presented to the delegates. Is there no plan to use the advertised "lab solve" utility instead?

8. The timing of AU294 has been affected by the RHLS Course. So we have 4 days to deliver this in all forms with: one troubleshooting exercise and one lab removed from RH294, plus added devcontainer, git and VScode context in Chapter 1, plus one extra step to set up the above two in each of the guided exercises. 

Please also note that I would be perfectly happy to give the best possible explanation to the delegates and I do not expect any updates to the course. My goal of this ticket is to put curriculum developers on the same page with instructors, for whose, few eyebrows, way more experienced than my own, were raised recently. 

Thank you.