BETA Testing Open: KX Academy new sandbox

Community Support
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We are delighted to announce and provide early access to our new interactive KX Academy sandbox

What is the KX Academy?

KX Academy is a free online portal for on-demand learning for everything KX. There you will find training videos, access to a cloud hosted KX sandbox environment fully loaded with KX software, course materials as well as exercises so users can work through material at their own pace.

What is the KX Academy sandbox?

The new KX Academy sandbox leverages Project JupyterHub which is a multi-user Hub that spawns, manages, and proxies multiple instances of a single-user Jupyter notebook server. It is used widely in Academic institutions and has excellent documentation and an active online community.

The new sandbox uses JupyterHub by giving users access to computational environments loaded with KX software and KX training materials without burdening the users with installation and maintenance tasks.?

This will replace the existing learn.kx.com used by students via our self-serve KX Academy.

  • It is much faster than learn.kx.com - loads everything in seconds?
  • Saves progress as you work ?
  • No requirement to use different browsers or private browser mode
  • Ability to launch KX Products like kdb+, kdb+ insights and PyKX, Dashboards, Developer, Jupyter Notebooks with KX Academy Content with no installation or maintenance required

How to access?

Click any of the links below to get signed up and access:

Where to ask questions?

Here! You can subscribe to this discussion which means you will see comments from other beta testers too so this will allow you to connect with them and discuss together. You can also reach out directly to me on evangelism@kx.com if you prefer.

We’re very keen to get this right to have the best experience for our users and iron out any kinks so your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Michaela

Some additional Information about the Environment

  • Documentation on how to use JupyterLab (replacement for Jupyter Notebook)

  • As we use JupyterHub, you will see two additional items under the ‘File’ menu to handle ‘Log Out’ and access to the ‘Hub Control Panel’; this is described here and show in the image below

  • There are some restrictions on the environment:

    • 8GiB RAM

    • Remember to shutdown unused kernels as described here

    • 10GiB of persistent home space

    • If your browser session has been idle for more than three hours the environment will be shutdown

    • Network access is restricted to HTTP/HTTPS access only via proxy. Only the following domains are allowed:

      • ``*.kx.com`
      • *.firstderivatives.com (and *.fdtechnologies.com)
      • *.example.com
      • *.googleapis.com - most if not all of GCPs APIs

    • Be aware conda/pip will not be able to install directly extra packages

    • Workaround is that you may use the File Browser which supports upload/download as described here

  • Change requests are welcomed but only when they are of material benefit to whole community

Be aware that this is a KX funded resource and as such we actively monitor and inspect the usage of the service, including but not limited to content inside the users environment and the network traffic generated by it.

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The original sandbox was already an incredible resource, but these updates take it to another level! Thanks for sharing @Michaela!

3

Hi,

It seems like a link to KX Fundamentals Course doesn’t work.

BTW, thanks a bunch for your effort to make all KX Academy workshops. They are very useful

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Thanks jk311. I’ve fixed the URL now

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What do you think about adding related YouTube links to each notebook?