What is
Sky Forged Labs?

My background is in enterprise IT support. I spent several years working across Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Exchange Online, and hybrid Active Directory at various companies, ranging from a large healthcare organization, a major univeristy, and at an MSP for Apple. Most of my day-to-day was owning the escalations that nobody else could figure out, working with Microsoft engineers on identity and licensing issues, and generally being the person the team came to when something did not have an obvious answer. I really enjoyed that work, but I knew I wanted to move toward building and designing things rather than supporting them.

The certifications were part of that transition. I went through AZ-900, SC-900, AZ-104, and AZ-305 while this lab was being built, and having both going at the same time made a big difference. A lot of the exam material made more sense once I had actually tried to build the things being tested, and the lab gave me somewhere to apply ideas I picked up while studying. This has been an awesome journey so far, and I am excited to continue building this project. What started as a portfolio piece has really turned into something I find a lot of joy in (and pain, looking at you front-end deveoplment).

The Office Survey app was the first "real" project I built here. I picked it because it forced me to work across a real full stack: a frontend that people could actually use, a backend API, a database, AI integration, and some automated reporting. It was complex enough to be worth doing but not so large that it would never get finished (or cost hundreds of dollars). I tried to do something with office culture for the sake of this project being a portfolio piece, and later decided to integrate the persona-schema to add some personality to it.

From the start, I made a few decisions that I have stuck with throughout the whole lab. Everything is managed with Terraform. I use serverless and consumption-based pricing wherever it is available so costs stay low. No secrets ever go into source control or application configuration in plaintext. Those rules have not, and will never change.

The diagram below shows what is currently deployed and running in the lab.

The lab is always expanding. Here is what is currently in progress or coming up soon.