I have enhanced my skills in the following areas:0. Built new Home Desktop System (8 cores/ 128 GB RAM) to host my home VM Network. 1. Google Cloud - Studying for GCP Associate Cloud Engineer and Professional Cloud Architect Exams. - Compute Engine, Cloud IAM, Cloud Storage, Cloud Shell commands - VPC - set up VPC (global context) to connect subnets in different regions. - Billing - set up projects/folders under a billing account. - Learning Terraform2. Networking - Set up VM network using VMWare Workstation Pro with dedicated subnets to provide an isolated environment for each learning objective. I manually set up all routing, configuring a limited number of routers with NAT. All other VMs access the Internet via the routers, and do not have NAT. This is for simplicity and security. I edited firewalls (iptables for Ubuntu/Kali and firewalld for RHEL/Fedora) as required. A. RHEL - running Ansible playbooks to automate VM updates for the entire network, using SSH keys. B. Fedora - learning NGINX on AWS and for Python. C. Ubuntu - primarily used for Kubernetes. Set up a 4 node cluster. D. Kali - running security tools such as nmap (port scanning) and metasploit (assessing vulnerabilities). E. Home PC - PyCharm Python IDE for additional Python projects. Tools used regularly:1. Wireshark (loaded on each VM) - trace packets to identify connection issues etc.2. Ansible Playbooks in yaml format.3. LINUX Admin tools (apt, yum, dnf, Network Manager, systemctl, BASH shell scripting)4. VMWare REST-based API to turn on/off machines on the network.The experience of being LINUX Admin and Architect/Developer on my home NW has been challenging (I AM the help desk!), but ultimately rewarding.Security Learning:1. RSA, Diffe-Hellman, and other algorithms used in PKI (Public Key Infrastructure).2. Digital Signatures and the Digital Signal Algorithm (DSA)3. iptables and firewalld - on LINUX VMs. Netfilter hooks.

Taking care of a terminally ill family member.

Technical lead for End-to-End Scale and Performance for HCS Product.