Custom rootFS for playgrounds in iximiuz Labs

The playgrounds on https://labs.iximiuz.com have always been amazing, but they recently got an upgrade to enable creation with a custom image for their root filesystem. Not only is this super cool, but it unlocks the ability for authors to significantly speed up the boot times of their playgrounds and labs by pre-installing and configuring everything to achieve massive startup speed improvements. I recently went on a journey to try this out for myself, since I'd never done it before, and this is a writeup of where I made silly mistakes, so you don't have to. The New Project I'm heading to Kubecon EU next month, and I thought it would be cool to have a new project to demo. The committee didn't accept my proposal to present, but the joke's on them, since obviously, with an iximiuz Labs playground, I can demo it to anybody with a web browser. Only problem is that when I run this locally, it downloads and compiles the kubernetes operator from source, plus a bunch of other stuff that slows