Step-by-step breakdowns of real builds - Active Directory, hybrid identity, home lab infrastructure, and security tooling. Not theory, just what I built and how.
These walkthroughs come from my own home lab: a Docker host running 31 containers organized into logical stacks, plus Windows Server virtual machines for Active Directory and hybrid identity testing. Each lab below is being written up as a full step-by-step guide - the commands, the screenshots, and the mistakes I hit along the way - so you can rebuild the same environment yourself.
The first guides cover the identity fundamentals I use every day supporting 30+ higher education institutions: standing up an Active Directory domain from scratch, syncing it to Entra ID with Entra Connect, and enforcing MFA with Conditional Access policies. An Okta lab is planned after those - connecting a developer tenant to the same directory to compare SSO and provisioning against Entra ID. On the infrastructure side, the Docker walkthrough expands on how I organized 31 containers into 7 stacks with monitoring and secrets management.
Until each guide ships, the blog covers the same ground in story form - see a real hybrid identity lockout or the MFA chicken-and-egg loop for the kinds of failures these labs are built to reproduce.
Stand up a Windows Server domain controller from scratch, create OUs, configure Group Policy, join workstations, and set up a basic user provisioning workflow. The foundation for every hybrid identity lab that follows.
Connect an on-prem Active Directory to Entra ID with Entra Connect Sync, configure hybrid join for devices, and test password hash sync and seamless SSO in a real lab environment.
Organize containers into logical stacks with shared networking, secrets management, Prometheus and Grafana monitoring, and automated backups. Based on the approach from the 31-container reorganization blog post.
Configure Entra ID Conditional Access policies, enforce MFA for specific user groups, set up break-glass accounts, and test the authentication flow end to end.