> - provide teachers and professors with online remote tools to do their lessons
>
> - give students the opportunity to study real life examples in their chosen area of expertise
>
> - allow developers to fully test and debug their applications and provide POC’s
>
> - or you simply want to use a Application (in a microservices-based architecture)
>
> Swarmlab provides you with all the required tools, tools to teach work or try out demos in a completely virtual environment.
>
> More info: http://docs.swarmlab.io/SwarmLab-HowTos/swarmlab/docs/swarmlab/docs/index.html
![alt text](images/swarmlab-network.png "")
## LabInstance Alpine 3.13
You have to have a base image on which you will install all of your library and code to create your own custom image. you can use any base image like debian, centos,ubuntu.But you will be certainly biased to any image which is small in size and which has all the repo link. And there come alpine.
From alpine description
Alpine Linux is a Linux distribution built around musl libc and BusyBox. The image is only 5 MB in size and has access to a package repository that is much more complete than other BusyBox based images. This makes Alpine Linux a great image base for utilities and even production applications.
>
> For comparison, here’s how Alpine compares to other popular distributions of Linux:
- You can run them **through the swarmlab hybrid environment** (http://docs.swarmlab.io/SwarmLab-HowTos/swarmlab/docs/swarmlab/docs/hybrid/start-microservices.html)
- or use them individually at will on the **command line of your system**