Playground
A production-inspired homelab treated as a platform to commission—not a collection of containers to accumulate.
The idea
The interesting part is not the stack. It is the discipline around the stack: establish a baseline, change one layer, prove it, document it, and prove that it can recover.
A lab with acceptance criteria
Playground is a private infrastructure environment built to make platform engineering concrete. Services are introduced in bounded tranches with explicit prerequisites, resource limits, network boundaries, acceptance checks, and a durable operating record.
Reliability is part of the feature
A green dashboard is not enough. Backup coverage is inspected, recovery copies are validated, restore paths are exercised, and critical layers are checked again after reboot. Failures become revisions to the method rather than folklore.
Designed for another operator
Each commissioned service leaves behind a record of purpose, dependencies, boundaries, recovery behavior, and the evidence used to accept it. The system is not considered complete if only its builder can understand it.
What this work demonstrates
Evidence, not a capability list.
- Layered commissioning with named checkpoints
- Health checks and negative-exposure tests
- Restore validation—not backup optimism
- Reboot survival as an acceptance condition
- Service-level records and clean handoffs
Public boundary
Public diagrams deliberately describe layers and operating method, not the private environment's addresses, topology, credentials, access rules, or recovery destinations.