Home lab - refactoring

A while back I mentioned that the home lab was being shut down: http://blog.practicaltech.ca/2014/02/lab-update-2014-thanks-mister-lab.html

Haha, wow, almost 2 years ago.  It's been mostly off during that time, so over the last few days I've inventorized everything gathering dust.  Time to move on or re-purpose!

Stuff that's going:
  • All of the heavy duty networking gear & fibre
  • All of the ESXi hosts
  • The majority of the spinning disk storage
  • All of the random stuff that's accumulated
  • The rack!
Basically if I can't store it inside my office area, it's gotta go.  That doesn't leave much...

The new way forward for me will be in "DevOps" & automation-related things, with a minor in monitoring/metrics.  This only really requires a beefy PC for a home lab - if anything I'd need some more storage for VMs.

Some new key areas for me to learn:
  • Learn how to work with Visual Studio projects/solutions
  • Learn/prototype PowerShell DSC
  • Learn MS build/deploy automation - pros/cons
  • Learn TDD as it relates to PowerShell
The major focus at work right now is: 'How can we move toward Continuous Delivery?'

Build/deploy automation, test automation, and monitoring/metrics are my technical bread/butter these days, with the other side being 'help the entire team along this new path'.

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