First Steps for my VCDX Design

I have publicly committed to submitting a design to the VCDX committee. My design is due in March 2017. I’m very glad I signed up to submit because it has kick started my motivation. Today I wanted to talk about my progress.

I am using an actual design for a project I worked on. It’s a fairly complex system with many moving pieces. It mostly meets AMPRS requirements (Availability, Manageability, Performance, Recoverability, Security) so I shouldn’t have to do much tweaking to make it pass muster.

Before I talk about the design itself in a future post I feel like I should talk about how I got started. First off I created an Evernote notebook to work on my draft. Then I created a note for all the parts I could think of. I created a blank note for the executive summary, the conceptual design, then each of the configuration levels I could think of. This will expand as I go.

When I first started I couldn’t focus. I knew what I had built, where my design fell short, and I started from the middle, jumped around, and floundered. It seemed impossible to do it right.

Now I’ve started over. I decided to start at the beginning and define what I was really trying to accomplish. Thanks to advice from Ariel Sanchez I knew I needed to know what problem I was trying to solve. I need a good foundation to keep me on track and now I have it.