Hands-on lab bootcamp
Starting your own innovation team? Building out a sandbox environment? Or simply want to learn how to build a full-stack home lab from the ground up?
Our bespoke, 5-day, hands-on bootcamp can be tailored for your exact needs, and will guide you through everything you need to build a complete end-to-end innovation environment.
This bootcamp is offered for a maximum 5 people to ensure adequate support and guidance throughout, and for an additional cost you can even take all the hardware away with you at the end of the week - everything you need for your own hackathon, sandbox or home-lab!
A typical bootcamp might look like:
Monday
Fundamentals and concepts; a background to virtual local area networks (VLANs), hypervisors, containers, operating systems, Active Directory, LDAP, RADIUS and more.
By the end of the day, you will have provisioned your local network (typically using Ubiquiti equipment), setup a hypervisor (typically Windows Server with Hyper-V) and Active Directory.
Tuesday
More networking, and developer experience; configure WPA-3 enterprise Wi-Fi using certificate-based authentication, start understanding the role Group Policy plays in security, management and efficiency of your lab, and build out source control and chat (typically utilising GitLab and Mattermost).
By the end of the day, you'll have roles created for organisers and delegates, as well as a functioning source control and chat service to allow everyone to collaborate and communicate together within your lab. We'll also cover options for supporting virtual/remote access into your lab environment and how CI/CD can accelerate your innovation projects.
Wednesday
Shared services and cloud interoperability; from hosting internal services (intranet) to CI/CD platforms
By the end of the day you'll have a container hosting platform (typically Portainer and Docker), a web server (typically IIS and/or NGINX) as well as connections into at least one cloud provider (typically AWS) allowing your lab environment to seamlessly span both - maximize the benefits of on-prem infrastructure and the scalability of the cloud. We'll touch on authentication mechanisms from LDAP to OAuth, the pros and cons and discuss the optimum strategy for your environment and requirements.
Thursday
Automatic delegate deployment and build; we'll cover different ways you may chose to deploy delegates into your environment - from PXE booting and thin clients, to clean builds and gold copy images. We'll pick the right technology for your requirements, but the options are likely to incorporate one or more of Chocolatey, Ansible, WSUS, Sonatype Nexus, Entra/Intune.
By the end of the day, you'll have a clear understanding of the pros and cons of different solutions, along with a deep dive into at least one method (typically Microsoft Deployment Toolkit - MDT). The goal being regardless of your chosen setup, delegates can arrive into your environment and reach maximum productivity within 60 minutes - no lengthy downloads and waiting hours for software to install.
Friday
Security and wrapping up; we'll implement 802.1X authentication for your wired network and configure automatic issuance and renewal of certificates through group policy. We'll also cover Active Directory best practices adhering to the principle of least privilege and some extra hints and tips to suit your own requirements.
We'll cover automatic updates and patching (utilising services like Azure Arc), ensuring your environment needs minimal supervision to stay up to date and always ready for your next great event.
By the end of the day, you'll understand the roles group policy and RADIUS has with managing the security of your environment, and have created a collection of dashboards, reports and other monitoring to satisfy any audit and observability requirements.
With everything completed and ready to go, you can chose to walk away with all the hardware used during the week ready to delvier your own innovation environment.