Blog post: Scaling our hands-on lab infrastructure for self-paced training (Publish date TBD)

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## Triage (REQUIRED)

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## Proposal

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```
description:

We want to share the behind the scenes story of how we are scaling our Demo Systems hands-on lab infrastructure from 500 to 5,000+ users as we live our values of collaboration, iteration, results and transparency, even when it’s hard.
```

```
introduction:

Last week we posted a [blog article](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/04/20/everyone-can-get-certified/) about our new self-paced GitLab certification program with hands-on labs that included a 100% discount code. 

The Professional Services team was excited to release this offering and from a hands-on lab infrastructure capacity, it was considered to be just another addition to our growing list of self-paced training offerings with hands-on labs that haven’t had any capacity challenges in the past. What we didn't anticipate is the interest that this would generate when it was published on our blog and shared virally on social media. As it turns out, when you offer something for free to our 30,000,000+ users, there is certainly going to be some interest! 

I want to share the behind the scenes story of how we are scaling our Demo Systems hands-on labs infrastructure from 500 to 5,000+ users, and some of the business and technical challenges that we’ve had to overcome in the last week. At GitLab, we try to live our values of collaboration, iteration, results, and transparency, even when it’s hard. We’re not perfect, however here is the story of what happened and how we’re iterating to make things better for everyone.
```

Full blog post draft with comment rights. Editor can request rights to edit.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UyDne_HPQ2Ki4cefpt21UBRrfr3vEY0-ogmNvBb5nDU/edit?usp=sharing

## Roles and Responsibilities 

| Person | Role |
| ------ | ------ |
| @jeffersonmartin | requestor & author | 
| @skassabian | editor |
| @c.yoshida | approver | 
| @dsakamoto | approver | 

### Checklist

- [ ] If you have a specific publish date in mind (please allow 3 weeks' lead time)
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## Production 
- [ ] Requestor to complete issue template (Triage, Proposal, Roles and Responsibilities, Checklist )
- [ ] Issue sent through triage for consideration (approve, backlog, deny) 
- [ ] Issue assigned to requestor to draft blog post and open MR
- [ ] MR created and linked to issue - issue is now deprecated in favor of MR and will close once MR is complete

Story points: 4.0