Building TNP: Why I Built an Enterprise-Realistic DevOps Lab (Part 0)

🧭 This is Part 0 of a 10-part series documenting a self-built, enterprise-realistic DevOps lab — modeled after a fictional fintech company, not a pile of unrelated tools. TL;DR Most homelab tutorials teach tools in isolation. This series teaches them working together, inside a fictional company with real constraints. Meet TNP Technologies — a fictional fintech with 150 employees, hybrid infrastructure, and a product called TNP Pay. The lab runs entirely on one 64GB Windows machine, no cloud dependency for the core loop. 10 parts, from infrastructure setup to chaos engineering — each one builds on the last. The problem with most homelab tutorials Most DevOps homelab guides follow the same pattern: install Docker → install Kubernetes → install Prometheus → done You end up with a pile of tools running side by side. Each one works. None of them talk to each other the way they would inside a real company. That's not what a DevOps engi