It's 2026. Installing Linux, spinning up a VM, and launching containers is easy. So why does building a real cloud at home and in enterprise still feel like an endless IKEA maze? And where are the do-it-yourself instructions?
The cloud engineering landscape is dominated by open source ecosystems promising low barriers to entry. Optimistic blog posts offer conflicting guidance. Product and tooling sprawl leaves newcomers and veterans alike dizzy from choice paralysis and compatibility matrices. You can find documentation for any single tool, but stitching ten tools into something that actually works together under extreme conditions? That's where the blog posts end and the late nights begin.
Drawing on a decade of experience deploying to homelabs, enterprise clouds, even submarines, and satellites, we'll talk the talk and walk the walk live.
This session presents one opinionated stack as a known good startingline. Not the "right" tools, just tools to get the job done when debugging at 2am without the sprawl of a dozen dashboards. Where productivity results in better trial and error and more comfort on your own hero's journey.
Together, build your own cloud, command by command and click by click:
1. Launch a remote developer environment, everything included
2. Deploy the undercloud
3. Spin up virtual machines and containers side by side
4. Build an overcloud
5. Deploy the operator control plane
6. Roll out a configuration change
Technologies include: devcontainers, nix, Docker-in-Docker, Kubernetes in containers, KubeVirt, Ceph, libvirt, KVM, Cilium, Zot, Dagger, Gitea, mise, Runme, Ghostty, tmux, Neovim, VS Code/Cursor, Talos Kubernetes, and more.
You'll feel at home whether you're a terminal junkie, TUI connoisseur, and CLI ninja, or if you prefer a refined full IDE and click-to-run exercises. Make sense of the complexity with easy to follow diagrams, hear stories from the field, and get hands-on technicals to break down complex bits into familiar patterns and connect the layers to tangible hardware in your hands.
Technology is all about the human stories you can create. Bring your laptop to follow along, or snap the QR code and try it later with friends. Take home the as-seen-on-TV toolkit and everything needed to hack your own cloud projects.
