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Yes, it's a good idea to play with the bleeding edge stuff in your homelab, because when you start having to make recommendations for clients, you need to understand what is "forward" for them and every cycle try to bring them closer to that. You're not usually going to be given the time, budget, staff, and freedom to disrupt money-generating activities necessary to turn a company that does remote work by RDPing onto machines accessible from the internet into a modern network in one step. But you can make a list of the biggest, fastest steps you can make right now to move them closer, your "quick wins". You can get them to put their RDP behind a modern, updated firewall and VPN. Once that's done, you can start segmenting their network, putting internal boundaries with firewall policies, setting VLANs... You can later leverage the work into getting to separate who should be able to access what to migrate them to ZTNA... Sometimes though, the way forward is also simply blocked by other considerations. One that I often encounter is line-of-buisness applications having specific requirements that just aren't meant to work in a bleeding edge environment. Infrastructure as Code and orchestration are great ideas, and I totally agree that the ideal is that your servers are cattle, not pets. That if you login to a server to do installs and configs directly you're not being efficient. But all line-of-business apps I interact with require manual installation and configuration. Pretty much all LOB software sold to small/medium businesses is designed for pets, and so is a large portion of the software developed internally for these companies. So you get that company better prepared, you try to mitigate the inconvenience of pets by making the pets as easily replaceable as possible, but you'll hit a point where you just have to wait on the software to catch up. In the meantime, you prepare by learning how to take the next step in your lab.
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