comments:
Piling on with the praise... What you've done at your age is extremely impressive! The only comment I have on home labbing is: Don't implement anything you're going to become dependent on unless you intend to support it And back it up. Your ISP router and GoogleDrive might suck but do you want to fix a router or firewall issue when you want to watch Netflix and do you want to store your data off site (3 places or it doesn't exist for important stuff). Other comments have mentioned, docker first then kubernetes. My personal opinion would be to play with docker using a GUI like Portainer, then experiment with docker via the command line, and then move on to making changes to the docker files. Understanding how to edit a yaml file, while not complicated is a step you can avoid until you've gained an understanding of how containers run, configured and downloaded. 2.1 When you make it to kubernetes. I read https://www.amazon.com/Kubernetes-Book-Version-November-2018-ebook/dp/B072TS9ZQZ/ref=sr_1_1?sr=8-1 when I first started out and it was and still is a good resource. 3. Get a free Cloudflare account and look at the Zero trust networking. Lots of companies use Cloudflare, Akamai or similar for WAF (Web Application Firewall). 3.1. Publish an internally hosted application (on docker maybe?) on the internet through a cloudflare tunnel or similar. the tunnel connects out from your network to cloudflare and you can restrict access in a number of ways. Ip restriction is a reasonable way to start and if you're ever not sure if it's safe, turn off the tunnel app in your local network. 3.2 Certificates. Cloudflare can do some of the work for you but for renewing and managing your own, ACME is the way to go right now. They're vital for almost everything and free for the most part. 4. Personally, I wish I'd known that I enjoy the code side of things as much as (or sometimes more) the sysadmin/devops side. You're already making good use of "AI" tools and you should continue to do so; but also consider how business and large enterprises you're going to end up working for might want to run these and if it tickles your fancy, train them too. As you progress and you add (to your already very impressive) skill set, think about a few things: 1.Automation (Companies love the idea of you automating you and everyone else out of a job but really you just save yourself doing boring stuff). Depending on what you're doing some tools to look into are: Harness, Jenkins, Ansible, Azure DevOps, Github actions and many more. Scripting wise, Bash, Python and PowerShell for Windows. This is where you smash it with AI. Just make sure you understand what you're running. 2. Redundancy and availability - Too much to mention but no one wants to lose anything, ever. Even if they sign contracts saying so.