Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions have established themselves as a highly effective pedagogical tool in cybersecurity education, offering students hands-on experience in realistic attack and defense scenarios. However, organizing and hosting these events requires considerable infrastructure effort, which frequently limits their adoption in academic settings. This paper presents the design, iterative development, and evaluation of a CTF as a Service (CaaS) platform built on Proxmox virtualization, leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform and Ansible, container orchestration via Docker Swarm, and load balancing with HAProxy. The system supports both a development-centered workflow, in which challenges are automatically deployed from a Git repository through a CI/CD pipeline, and a deployment-oriented workflow for ad-hoc infrastructure provisioning. The paper describes the design decisions made, the challenges encountered during development, and the solutions implemented to achieve session persistence, external routing, and challenge replicability. The platform is designed to evolve into a CTF hosting service with commercial potential, and future lines of work are outlined regarding automatic scaling, monitoring integration, and frontend standardization.

翻译："夺旗赛（CTF）竞赛已成为网络安全教育中极为有效的教学工具，为学生提供了在真实攻防场景中的实践体验。然而，组织并举办这些活动需要投入大量基础设施资源，这往往限制了其在学术环境中的推广应用。本文介绍了基于Proxmox虚拟化技术构建的CTF即服务平台（CaaS）的设计、迭代开发与评估过程。该平台利用Terraform和Ansible等基础设施即代码（IaC）工具、通过Docker Swarm实现的容器编排技术，以及借助HAProxy实现的负载均衡机制。系统支持两种工作流：一种是以开发为中心的工作流，通过CI/CD流水线从Git仓库自动部署竞赛挑战；另一种是以部署为导向的工作流，用于临时基础设施的快速配置。本文阐述了设计决策过程、开发中遇到的挑战，以及为实现会话持久性、外部路由和挑战可复现性所实施的解决方案。该平台旨在逐步演变为具有商业潜力的CTF托管服务，并进一步规划了自动扩展、监控集成与前端标准化等未来研究方向。"