The Self-Hosted Stack - Building Your Own Cloud with Open Source

Speaker: Brandon Hopkins

Room: HC 203

Time: Sun 9:30 am – 10:00 am

Format: Lecture (30 Min + Q&A)

Difficulty: Introductory

Track: Self-Hosting

Presenter Location: In-person

Experience: first time speaking

Description:

Most people assume that building a personal cloud requires expensive hardware, endless maintenance, or settling for something unreliable. Brandon has been running a production‑grade homelab for years, and in this talk he shows how approachable — and powerful — a modern self‑hosted stack can be.

Attendees will walk through a real, fully open‑source home cloud built on:

Proxmox as the virtualization foundation

Nextcloud as an alternative to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace

Immich as a replacement for Google Photos

Jellyfin instead of commercial streaming services

NetBird to securely connect everything without punching firewall holes

The session covers why people switch to self‑hosting, the real‑world tradeoffs, and what you should consider before diving in. You’ll leave with a clear picture of what a modern open‑source home cloud looks like, what it takes to build one, and whether it’s the right move for you.

Target Audience:

People interested in self‑hosting