Security, resilience and stability test are an important step to protect the information and communication-based digital society. Experimental platforms allow researchers to evaluate todays and tomorrows internet architectures, protocols and applications. However, selecting the most adequate platform is difficult. In this paper we first present a common used approach based on real world testbeds. We identify a couple of problem coming around with this approach and show how emulation-based testbeds can avoids them. Finally we present an hybrid approach to combine the benefits of both systems to provide a scalable, repeatable, controllable, flexible and secure experimental platform.