I recently signed up for the online Virtual Design Master community event as I watched last years event and thought its looked fun. The idea around VDM is to get participants from around the globe and assign them made up design challenges in a made up scenarios, over the seasons they have had a running story where the world as we know it is overcome with zombies which naturally presents extreme challenges. I also met some of last years contestants through the community who said it was a great experience - Gareth Edwards @GarethEdwards86 and the eventual winner Katrina Wagnerova @_KatkaW_
This years first challenge was a continuation of the story where we had to build a 3 tier architecture to run a new application with unlimited scope on technologies, this in itself proved challenging as there was so many assumptions and ways to go. There was big hints around a devop environment. Below is the full challenge.
After many different ideas i went for 3 sites running VMware on AWS as I wanted to also run Horizon for staff to access remotely but also needed the scale from AWS. I then went further and looked at creating a containerised application to run in native AWS using Terraform, Docker and Amazon Container Services that would be developed on the vSphere environment then ran on AWS for production for the scale. It was a blast looking into Terraform, containerised options such as Docker and Kubernetes while looking into AWS further. My full design can be seen below
The defence was yesterday and with a panel of 3 x VCDX judges (@RebeccaFitzhugh @LiorKamrat and @byronschaller) it was daunting to say the least but also pretty cool, its great to get their take on my approach. You can see the full defence online here. Also check out the other contestants documents online here.
Well I made it through this week, watch out for challenge 2 next week.