Michael Hinsley

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.