Reflection

When starting this capstone, I wanted to create something that utilized as much of my 3 year college program as possible. One of the hardest parts was, creating the business case. I wanted to create a multi-tenant private cloud without positioning it as a competitor with AWS, Azure, or other Hyper Scaler platforms. The solution was framing it as a consultancy that offers IT infrastructure and private cloud deployments. The idea being to transition companies from public cloud platforms to an on premises private cloud to offer complete control and ownership of their data and infrastructure.

My Capstone was selected to attend the Durham College IT Expo, presented by the Brock Board of Trade. The judges assigned to our section had business backgrounds rather than technical, which made meaningful discussions about my capstone project difficult. The IT Expo provided us with a graded rubric on how the judges would be evaluating our capstone but that was never utilized or provided to the participating groups. Rather than to walk away with just a grade and no substantial feedback at all, I decided to reach out to my capstone professor for technical feedback on my project. The feedback that I received from my professor confirmed that the technical decisions that I made were sound, while giving me a clear picture on how it could have been improved.

The areas of improvement that my professor pointed out would have significantly improved the implementation. some of the improvements I did recognize during the design of the project, but due to time constraints, I decided to leave them out of the scope. A proper monitoring layer with logging, SIEM integration, and performance dashboards, deeper disaster recovery planning with defined RPO and RTO objectives, as well as a proper automation layer with infrastructure as code and a self service provisioning portal would move this project MUCH closer to a production ready offering.

looking back, I am proud of what I was able to put together for this capstone project. There were some things that I would have liked to include, specifically some form of automation for tenant onboarding, but due to time constraints I was not able to include it in the scope. This project forced me to think about many aspects of the infrastructure such as, tenant isolation, router and switch configuration, Identity management, RBAC, VPNs, Virtualization, etc. Bringing all of these aspects together into a cohesive solution is what I find most interesting, and what I want to build a career around.

If you have any questions about the implementation or would like to discuss it further, feel free to reach out.