Michael Hinsley

About

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…

Books

• Apache CloudStack — A Production Deployment Guide

  Part 1 — Foundations · Building a Sovereign Cloud on Apache CloudStack 4.22.1.0 LTS

  When a license renewal lands at 567% of last year’s bill, renting your infrastructure stops being a strategy. This is the escape tunnel: a complete production…

• Apache CloudStack — AI Factory Edition

  Building and running a flexible, small-scale yet powerful local AI factory on commodity enterprise hardware

  A model you rent can be repriced, throttled or revoked. A model you own cannot. Build a sovereign local AI factory on commodity enterprise hardware: Apache…

• The Autonomous Lab: Engineering Agentic Infrastructure with MatrixClaw

  Building verifiable compliance and AI-driven automation on real hardware

  An AI asked to build a network and its own tooling refused — no human had signed. Six weeks later the same machinery governed bare metal serving a…