Potential Topic List - brian-anderson01/Capstone GitHub Wiki

Office in the cloud

The idea behind the office in the cloud is to have every aspect of the organization on the cloud. Everything that you would need for work would be accessible from anywhere with an internet connection and a computer. I think that this topic matters because people are moving around a lot, especially now. With offices doing a lot of work remote, in person or a mix people are moving around a lot and may not always be in the office. Things like VPN connections and remote desktop can be finicky and a pain to set up. Along with this, having an organization on the cloud can increase security, minimize ransomware risk and nearly eliminate disaster recovery. My plan for setting up this office in the cloud would be using Microsoft Azure. With Azure, I plan to use Azure Active Directory and implement group policy. File sharing would all be done through SharePoint or OneDrive for Business and possibly implemented into Group Policy if possible. Along with this, users would automatically have email through Office 365 along with the Office apps. VMs could also be made on Azure for expansion and for use on nearly any computer with a web browser. Employees would simply need to sign into their work Microsoft account and they will be signed into their AD user and have access to SharePoint and all of their other information. This way all of the resources from the office are available in the office, onsite, at home, or anywhere else.

Automation of VM deployment for DevOps using Ansible and other related tools

The idea behind the automation of VM deployment is that developers need virtual environments to test software that is in development. The developers need to be able to go in and potentially break a VM and spin another up on-demand. That's where the idea behind Automating VM creation with ansible or another related tool comes in. Ideally, with one simple command, a script is run and creates one or more virtual machines with the required software already installed and ready to go. This topic interests me because automation and scripting have always interested me and being able to spin up a VM on demand would be something really interesting to learn. We also worked with Ansible a little bit in the sysadmin course, however, we nearly only screatched the surface there. Along with just making the VM there's learning how to install applications and run services automatically. I would want to look into both windows and Linux deployment.