Leanpub Book LAUNCH 🚀 Apache CloudStack — A Production Deployment Guide: Part 1 - Foundations
For a decade the industry outsourced its thinking and treated hypervisors like electricity. Then the landlord changed the locks. When the renewal letter lands at 567% of last year's bill, it isn't a price rise — for many organisations it's an extinction event. This book is the escape tu...
Welcome to the Leanpub Launch video for Apache CloudStack — A Production Deployment Guide: Part 1 — Foundations · Building a Sovereign Cloud on Apache CloudStack 4.22.1.0 LTS by Michael Hinsley!
About the Book
For a decade the industry outsourced its thinking and treated hypervisors like electricity. Then the landlord changed the locks. When the renewal letter lands at 567% of last year's bill, it isn't a price rise — for many organisations it's an extinction event.
This book is the escape tunnel. It follows a fictional UK publisher, Leaf Spine Books, out of a strangling licensing model and onto a sovereign platform they own down to the last packet: Apache CloudStack 4.22.1.0 LTS on KVM, Ceph storage deployed with cephadm, and a SONiC leaf-spine fabric on open networking switches — a three-city estate (Manchester, London, Leeds)
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Part 1 — Foundations (Chapters 1–18) takes you from the renewal letter to a live, multi-zone production cloud:
- Design and economics — the full three-city blueprint: hardware, VLAN and IP plans, GPU capacity from day one, and honest arithmetic on what sovereignty actually costs
- A lab you can break — the whole design in miniature on one second-hand server, so every mistake costs an evening rather than a career
- The production build — hardened Ubuntu hosts, a MariaDB Galera control-plane database, HA management servers, DRBD/NFS secondary storage, and a six-node NVMe Ceph RBD cluster, each layer drilled against real failure before the next goes on top
- The cloud goes live — zone deployment, KVM compute clusters, GPU passthrough, first guest workloads, VPC multi-tier networking, and the SONiC fabric built for real
- Running it like you mean it — multi-zone expansion, federated monitoring, sovereign alerting, backup and disaster recovery with an independent-fate cluster, and cost optimisation that turns raw usage into a defensible bill
Every number is labelled for what it is — measured, forecast, or illustration — and every procedure is meant to be rehearsed in a lab before it touches production. The method is yours to take, adapt, and run on hardware you own.
About the Author
Mike Hinsley has spent more than three decades with his hands on real infrastructure — from electronics and engineering through operations, security, cloud and SaaS — and has never lost the habit of wanting to understand the machine all the way down. He is the founder of a UK infrastructure consultancy that helps organisations escape per‑core licensing lock‑in by migrating from VMware/Broadcom to sovereign, self‑owned platforms built on Apache CloudStack, with documented client savings of up to 94%. His guiding principle is one he calls GYOCYO — Grow Your Own, Cook Your Own: own the means of a capability rather than rent it as a finished product. He lives it literally. From a smallholding in rural Cheshire he runs large‑scale aquaponics, IoT‑monitored beehives, and a 28.8 kW solar array backed by 90 kWh of battery storage — the same instrument‑everything, owe‑nothing‑to‑anyone thinking he brings to enterprise clients, proven first on his own land. His HIVE‑DC concept — a data centre in a beehive — grew directly out of that overlap. Mike previously presented "Aquaponics, Apiculture, and Advanced Networking with Apache CloudStack" at the CloudStack European User Group in London. He publishes under the Leaf Spine Books imprint, and is preparing to establish a sustainable‑technology education centre uniting aquaponics, beekeeping and cloud infrastructure under one roof.
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