Driven by curiosity and some late night ebay purchases, I ended up down the rabbit hole of building a cloud from scratch: why use OpenStack when you can do it the hard way. This was a great excuse to dive into the various subsystems required to assemble a cloud and to find out how frustrating aspects of it could be. A cloud is a jigsaw, requiring many different pieces to fit together and co-operate. This talk will take a look at a number of Open Source technologies and how they fit into this puzzle: First you need a way to run Virtual Machines, this is probably the easiest part of the jigsaw. Next you need a way to store and distribute your Virtual Machine volumes. Ceph fits in here nicely. Then you need a way to connect all your Virtual Machines together. You could just use the Linux networking stack. Or you could look at VPP, an exciting userspace networking stack born out of Cisco. Great now your VMs can talk to each other and things, but how do you do that first boot configuration: well hello Cloud Init. Finally you need a way to push traffic to your VMs, enter HAProxy.