Module 9 · Labs

These five labs turn everything you’ve built into a job-ready portfolio and the confidence to land the interview. They’re lighter on new infrastructure and heavier on synthesis, presentation, and practice — because at this point the technical work is done; the task is making the world see it. The capstone (Lab 4) is your polished “Hire Me” portfolio, the culmination of the whole curriculum.

Lab 1 · The mapping

Goal: internalize the homelab→cloud translation by writing it in your own words. Exercises Lesson 9.1.

Steps

For each row of the mapping table in Lesson 9.1, write one short paragraph tying your specific homelab implementation to the cloud service — e.g. “My OpenWrt VLAN segmentation (Module 3) is the same idea as a cloud VPC with subnets and security groups; in my lab I separated IoT from servers so that…”
Explain the shared responsibility model in your own words, with an example of something that’s your responsibility in the cloud.
Turn this into a blog post — it’s genuinely useful content and shows employers you think in both vocabularies.

Verify

Every mapping row is tied to your concrete homelab implementation.
You can explain shared responsibility with a real example.
It’s published as a post on your site.

Commit

blog/09-homelab-to-cloud.md.

Lab 2 · Cloud, once

Goal: deploy and destroy one real cloud resource as code. Exercises Lesson 9.2.

Steps

Pick a free tier (AWS, GCP, Oracle Cloud, Azure). Set a billing alert first.
Install Terraform. Write a minimal config for one real resource — a VM, or a VPC + subnet + firewall rule, or a static site on object storage.
terraform init → terraform plan (read it!) → terraform apply.
Interact with what you made — SSH into the VM (Lesson 0.2) and note it’s just a Linux server on someone else’s hardware.
terraform destroy — tear it all down so nothing accrues cost. Confirm it’s gone.

Verify

You deployed a real cloud resource via Terraform (not the console).
You read the plan output before applying.
You destroyed it and confirmed nothing is left running.
A billing alert is set on the account.

Commit

cloud/ with your Terraform config (no credentials — those are secrets, Lesson 7.3) and a note on what differed from your homelab.

Lab 3 · Threat model

Goal: produce a one-page threat model of your homelab and act on it. Exercises Lesson 9.3.

Steps

Using STRIDE as a prompt, walk through your homelab and list the meaningful threats — focusing on attack surface (what’s exposed) and blast radius (impact if compromised).
Answer the concrete questions from Lesson 9.3: what’s internet-reachable, what a leaked tunnel token allows, what a compromised IoT device can reach, your worst single point of failure, your most sensitive data.
Turn it into a prioritized backlog: for each threat, mitigate-now / mitigate-later / accept-with-reason.
Knock out the top three items and note what you changed.

Verify

A one-page threat model covering attack surface and blast radius exists.
It produced a prioritized backlog with explicit accept/mitigate decisions.
You actioned at least the top three items.

Commit

security/09-threat-model.md — and publish a version as a portfolio post; it signals senior-level risk thinking.

Lab 4 · Hire Me page

This is the module’s — and the curriculum’s — capstone deliverable. Build the portfolio page that gets you interviews. Exercises Lesson 9.4 and everything before it.

Steps

Curate your artifacts as case studies. For each major deliverable (Modules 1–8), write a short framing: the problem, what you did, and what it demonstrates — linking the full writeup.
Build the “Hire Me” page: map at least eight common job-description requirements to a linked artifact that proves each (the table in Lesson 9.4).
Polish the landing page so a stranger understands who you are and what you can do in 60 seconds (Lesson 0.5).
State the closed loop explicitly on the site: this portfolio runs on the infrastructure it describes.
Make sure everything is live on your self-hosted site (Module 6) and the showcase entry is current.

Verify

Your artifacts are presented as framed case studies, not raw notes.
The Hire Me page maps ≥8 job requirements to verifiable linked proof.
A stranger can grasp your capabilities in a minute.
It’s live on your own infrastructure, and the closed loop is stated.

Commit & publish

git add .        # to your self-hosted git server (Module 6)
git commit -m "Add Hire Me page and curated portfolio"
git push         # ...which auto-deploys via your Module 7 pipeline

Lab 5 · Mock interview

Goal: practice narrating your work out loud, so the interview goes as well as the portfolio. Exercises Lesson 9.4.

Steps

Find a partner (a friend, a peer, a community member) — or record yourself answering.
Have them ask you to walk through your architecture diagram (Module 3) and your purple-team report (Module 8).
Answer several “tell me about a time you…” questions using your artifacts as the material — debugging (WireGuard), security (purple team), automation (Ansible), architecture (the ADR).
For each, practice the what / why / what-went-wrong structure.
Record it, watch it back, note what to improve, and do it again.

Verify

You can narrate any major artifact fluently: what you did, why, and what broke.
You walked through your architecture and purple-team report without notes.
You reviewed a recording and identified improvements.

Commit

career/09-interview-prep.md: your story bank — a list of likely questions mapped to the artifact you’d use to answer each. Keep it; it’s your interview cheat sheet.

Module 9 checkpoint

I can explain every homelab component in cloud-native vocabulary (Lab 1)
I’ve deployed and destroyed real cloud infrastructure as code (Lab 2)
I have a written threat model of my own lab and acted on it (Lab 3)
My portfolio site maps job requirements to artifacts a stranger can verify (Lab 4)
I can confidently narrate any artifact: what, why, and what went wrong (Lab 5)
I’ve done at least one mock technical interview using my own work (Lab 5)

Deliverable

Your polished, self-hosted portfolio with a “Hire Me” page — the culmination of every module, hosted on the infrastructure you built, reachable through the network you secured, mapping what employers want to proof that you can do it.

You’re not done — you’ve started

This curriculum ends where a career begins. You built real infrastructure from bare metal, secured and automated it, and documented all of it in public on hardware you own. That’s a foundation most people never get.

Keep the homelab running — it’s now your permanent lab for trying anything new before you meet it at work. Add services, break them, fix them, write it up. The habit that got you here — building, securing, and documenting in public — is the thing that compounds over an entire career. New technology arrives; you’ll learn it the same way you learned all of this: by building it yourself and understanding it from the ground up.

Go get hired. Then come back and add your entry to the showcase — and, if you can, help the next person through the missing semester you just finished.

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