About StackRef

Why we're here

StackRef was founded in 2022 by Keith McDuffee — a CISSP-certified cloud architect with 20+ years across AWS, GCP, and Azure — to do the work he kept getting called in for: helping teams understand, secure, and optimize their cloud architecture and cost. Cloud environments have a way of growing faster than anyone can keep track of; StackRef brings the experience to make them organized, secure, and cost-effective again.

The name is the job description: your infrastructure is the formation, and StackRef is its referee — the “ref” for your “stack.” We keep your formations official, and we help turn winning ideas into shipped, production-grade reality.

What we do

Most of our work is hands-on consulting: designing scalable cloud architecture, hardening security and compliance, automating infrastructure, and cutting waste out of cloud bills across AWS, GCP, and Azure — engaged directly or through the AWS Marketplace.

We also build our own products. Hackathon Manager is an internal “hackathon in a box”: a self-hosted platform that handles participant registration, team formation, project submission, and judging, with AWS sandboxes for every team and automated code security and complexity scoring built in. It grew out of watching companies — especially remote-first ones — try to run internal hackathons on spreadsheets and goodwill.

And not everything we make is infrastructure: Pickasso is our retro pixel-art puzzle game for iPhone and iPad, now free on the App Store.

See all of our products and services.