Have you ever gone to your lab in order to test something out, and find yourself in a rabbit hole of troubleshooting base capabilities? You look at the clock four hours later and you haven’t yet started on what you were meant to do.

No? Me neither…

Off the back of these experiences, I have decided to put together a set of principles to guide any work that I do in the lab. Now, bear in mind that my lab is not really my lab - it’s a VMware lab that is used for customer demonstrations and use case testing. In some ways that makes me lucky - dealing with many people in a single environment helps me to understand some of the challenges that need to be addressed when looking at this from a team perspective.

Secure

All applications that support TLS will have certificates minted from a trusted internal certificate authority.
Authentication will be centrally managed through SAML.

Visible

Everything that gets deployed will have log aggregation and metric collection in place.
Configuration data and other relevant information will be placed in a version control system.

Automated

I will learn how to do something the first time, and then automate it for reuse.

Over the next few blog posts I will show how I am going about implementing these principles, and the knock on effect at each stage.