Hybrid: The Promise of the Cloud is Broken - So, I've built a new one

Sean Tracey

It's been 20 years since the term "Cloud" Computing first entered our collective minds - and given the size of the main cloud platforms these days, you'd be forgiven for thinking that building out cloud services is the exclusive purview of huge, multinational enterprises beyond the scope or capability of us mere mortals... But, I disagree - and I think that almost every cloud platform consumer is now being taken for a ride with arbitrary price hikes, artificial scarcity, and the false notion that if you're not shipping huge infrastructures, you're not doing it right.

So, what can you do about that? Well, I've built my own Cloud Platform - fledgling.cloud - to show that Cloud Computing can still be Cheap, Fast, and Good.

In this talk, I'll walk people through the entire fledgling.cloud stack: from compute providers, to isolation layers, to the pricing model, and more!

Sean Tracey describes himself simply as a “technologist” - a deliberately broad title that reflects both his curiosity and his refusal to be confined to a single discipline. Rather than following a conventional career path, he has built a professional life around exploring the many possibilities of technology, creating products, experimenting with ideas, and working across diverse technical domains. He is currently building his own products at Mitchell Technologies.

Over the course of his career, Tracey has held senior developer advocacy and developer relations roles at several major organisations. He has served as Head of Developer Relations at Expanso, working on Bacalhau, Developer Relations Manager at Moneyhub, Senior Developer Advocate at Amazon Web Services, Developer Advocate at IBM, Developer in the Labs department at Financial Times, and Creative Technologist at Redweb.

His core technical skills include JavaScript, Go, Python, and embedded programming with Arduino and Raspberry Pi. In addition to his development work, Tracey is an accomplished technical writer. Since 2013, he has published three books and 49 articles across three internationally distributed magazines. His writing primarily focuses on practical tutorials covering JavaScript, Python, and Arduino programming, though he has also authored feature pieces.

Much of his work is available online, along with open-source code shared via his GitHub profile. Tracey’s projects have received industry recognition and award nominations over the years.

Since 2012, he has won a BIMA award and been a finalist twice more. His work has also earned a Wirehive 100 Award for Best Use of Tech and a Media Innovation Award for Creative Craft. In 2018, he received the IBM Developer Ecosystems Group Innovation Award for developing W3ID middleware that simplified SSO integration for Node.js Express applications. In 2020, he was part of the team behind “Choirless,” an application built during lockdown that enabled remote group singing; the project won the IBM UK Labs Internal Call for Code Contest and placed second globally among 6,500 participants in IBM’s Call for Code Internal Challenge.

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This event is brought to you by: Software Practice Advancement (SPA) SG

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BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, 25 Copthall Ave, London, United Kingdom

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