2025 Year in Review

We are wrapping up the third year of SadServers, this 2025 has been our best one yet and I wanted to recap some of the things that happened. The number of Linux and DevOps scenarios almost doubled, there are close to 100 challenges now. We also introduced new scenarios around applications like Clickhouse, Harbor, Podman or Vault. The number of SadServers users have more than doubled. As a side effect there were times where for example we were running out of AWS spot instances in some AZs. We’ve had no major incidents though, uptime has been close to 100%. This doesn’t mean we didn’t make mistakes and that could be a good topic for a separate blog post. There are many new features introduced this year like the achievements page, the scenario invites, the command line history logs or the gift page. One system we decommissioned because it wasn’t used much and it was hard to maintain was the Asciinema replays. We also introduced the Business accounts, for companies doing DevOps assessments, either for internal training or for interviewing job candidates. We keep working on the next iteration of SadServers, the “SRE Simulator”. This is mostly work beign done for a separate product but in SadServers we use the system for the Kubernetes sandboxes (still PoC) and also some scenarios run as k8s pods on the new platform. Of course I have to mention AI. We use products like Cursor or Copilot for coding with mixed results and who knows what even the near future will bring. What we know is that there is a race by both established and startup companies working on AI agents for SRE. SadServers is a great platform for these AI companies to evaluate their products. Earlier in December we ran the “Advent of Sysadmin”; 12 days with a new scenario every day. This event turned out to be a huge success with about 10,000 people participating. I’m looking forward to 2026; my team and I are very excited for the new projects we are working on, as always focused on bringing value to our users.

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