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alexellisuk

7,439 karma · joined March 31, 2016

Founder OpenFaaS + inlets + actuated. https://www.alexellis.io/
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alexellisuk··on The 90s Unix Utility That Fell Out of Favour
True - mistakenly wrote 90s as that's when I used it in my youth :)
alexellisuk··on Show HN: Kubetail – Real-time log search for Kubernetes
I was about to comment about Stern. It's an established well known OSS project - I wonder if the author knew about it, and if so.. what was his inspiration for creating an almost identical clone, albeit with a UI on top?
alexellisuk··on Quadlet: Running Podman containers under systemd
Interesting to see Qualet on the front page of Hacker News. I don't think it has had enough attention. We had Ygal & Valentin from the project submit a guest post on how to run an inlets tunnel client (think of Ngrok/Cloudflared, but self-hosted without any SaaS limits) - https://inlets.dev/blog/2023/10/03/client-quadlet.html

Rather than using [container] they used [kube] and were able to bring along standard Kubernetes YAML making it quite portable.

alexellisuk··on IO Devices and Latency
Hi, what actually are _metal_ instances that are being used when you're on EC2 that have local NVME attached? Last time I looked, apart from the smallest/slowest Graviton, you have to spend circa 2.3k USD/mo to get a bare-metal instance from AWS - https://blog.alexellis.io/how-to-run-firecracker-without-kvm...
alexellisuk··on HashiCorp officially joins the IBM family
I'm surprised this isn't being talked about more
alexellisuk··on How to run Firecracker without KVM on cloud VMs
I've been keeping an eye on PVM since it was announced via the Kernel mailing list just over a year ago. It looked like a lot of work, and very early - to be honest, it is. But I took a couple of weeks out to build it, test it and report back - this is my write up, and a longer video walk-through so you can see it in action. Context is everything, so I also mention why microVMs are useful to me / my business, and briefly mention those use-cases. Hope you enjoy the read.

And if you've used PVM or know anything more about what's happening with it, I'd like to hear from you.

alexellisuk··on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Outage
Seeing the same here, unable to open the website or to send messages in the mobile app - UK.
alexellisuk··on Apple introduces iPad mini built for Apple Intelligence
If Apple's listening.. a 120Hz would have sold this for me. I'm still on a 2018 iPad Pro because the upgrade isn't worth the enormous cost including a basic keyboard and pencil, and the only device that has a 120Hz drawing experience is that iPad Pro.

For anyone who thinks the pencil on a 60Hz screen is "great", you need to try it on an iPad Pro next time you're in the apple store. You'll see the difference between the "ink" trailing and lagging, and actually drawing as you move the nib.

alexellisuk··on FreeBSD/EC2 boot performance over time
Nice improvements in boot speed. Perhaps a little blurb / intro / summary would be helpful to the post to help with understanding the achievements made.

Did the patches ever make it into Firecracker for booting FreeBSD as a guest? I looked back at the paper trail and it seemed like it may have stalled.

Does anyone know?

alexellisuk··on How to check for price drops with Functions, Cron and LLMs
Hi, I'm the founder of OpenFaaS

This is a blog post about the MIT licensed version of OpenFaaS ideal for automation/marketing tasks and temporary or short-lived workflows.

> Learn how Alex bought a set of premium chisels by monitoring the price using HTML scraping and a cron job with OpenFaaS. You can apply the same technique for things you'd like to buy or monitor.

I also compare an LLM vs web scraping, and talk about other real-world use-cases for this kind of approach that we use, and that we've seen other users running in production.

Hope you find it interesting/useful.

alexellisuk··on Show HN: kubetrim – tidy up old and broken cluster entries
Hi, Alex here the creator of kubetrim.

I know there must be a dozen or more tools which have an option to edit/manage entries in kubeconfig. Some like kubectx will only remove the context but leave the user and cluster entries in the YAML file.

Others rely on you having to think and we know that developer tools are really about ease of use.

kubetrim tries to connect to each cluster and removes the cluster and context for ones where it can't list nodes. There's a couple of safety precautions built-in too for when you have turned off WiFi etc.

Hope you like it, reception has been quite positive so far and of course I made this for myself because I like the UNIX style principle of "it does one thing well"

It's written in Go, and isn't complicated.

Enjoy it and have a good weekend.

alexellisuk··on On Autoscaling – What Goes Up Must Come Down
Hi I'm the founder of OpenFaaS and am sharing a new article looking back on autoscaling in OpenFaaS since its first iteration in 2016. This covers considerations for scaling up, down and to zero, along with what's needed to gracefully drain requests - and gives a glipse at cluster autoscaling too.
alexellisuk··on We're Now Actuated.com
Alex, the founder of actuated here, we're now actuated.com and are having a look back on the past couple of years

> We take a look back to our launch in November 2022, what we've learned since and what's next for actuated.com.

> Over two years ago we registered the actuated.dev domain with the intention to fix various issues with self-hosted CI runners for GitHub Actions using microVMs.

> I'll set out what we wanted to address in November 2022, the direction customer feedback has taken us, and what we're planning next.

alexellisuk··on A Collection of Kubernetes Notes
No direct affiliation to James the author of this content, but he hosts the website on his home Kubernetes cluster using inlets (a network tunnel product I work on). I checked it out and thought it was a really good resource for Kubernetes YAML.
alexellisuk··on Run AI Models with Ollama in CI with GitHub Actions
Hi, I'm the founder of actuated and have been creating a bunch of materials on learning Firecracker for the community over the past couple of years. In this tutorial I wanted to show how you can use GPUs mounted via VFIO for CI - for AI use-cases including e2e testing and training/embedding with acceleration.

If you've not used ollama before, it also gives you a quick guide to try it out on a CPU or GPU locally.

We're looking for folks who could use GPU acceleration in GitHub Actions or GitLab CI - feel free to reach out to me via the form on the pricing page if that's of interest.

If not, hope you learned something.

alexellisuk··on [dead]
No affiliation, I saw this announced by a new hire at Apple as one of their new open source projects.

It looks so much like Cue. What do folks make of it?

alexellisuk··on Stream OpenAI responses from functions using Server Sent Events
Hi, I'm the OpenFaaS founder, a bit about this new blog post and capability:

OpenAI models can take some time to fully respond, so we’ll show you how to stream responses from functions using Server Sent Events (SSE).

With the latest versions of the OpenFaaS helm charts, watchdog and python-flask template, you can now stream responses using Server Sent Events (SSE) directly from your functions. Prior to these changes, if a chat completion was going to take 10 seconds to emit several paragraphs of text, the user would have had to wait that long to see the first word.

alexellisuk··on GitHub Actions as a time-sharing supercomputer
If you're running a full docker daemon, then you'll be running as a privileged container which is worse or about the same in terms of terms of poor security. Anyone's workload can compromise the host, and likely the cluster.

Rootless containers are a lot of work and do not support many scenarios that you're going to need.

MicroVMs are the same experience as GitHub, full system and Kernel, do what you will. Even launch a nested VM.

alexellisuk··on GitHub Actions as a time-sharing supercomputer
Good question, I covered that in detail, including the issues with Docker In Docker.

https://actuated.dev/blog/blazing-fast-ci-with-microvms

https://docs.actuated.dev/faq/

alexellisuk··on Booting the Raspberry Pi 5 from NVMe
People are starting to get their hands on PCIe breakout boards, and are having almost as much fun with them as Jeff Geerling.

So, here's _my workflow_ for setting up the Raspberry Pi 5 to boot from NVMe for headless use. I'll also give my thoughts on the initial generation of PCIe breakout boards and some experiences trying to get the Google Coral Edge TPU ML accelerator to work.

alexellisuk··on GitHub Actions as a time-sharing supercomputer
I wanted to see how the idea of a "time-sharing" computer from the 1970s could be applied to modern computing tasks. The API for GitHub and GitHub Actions was ideal for being able to submit bash scripts and have them execute in a VM, including secrets management and getting binary results back to the local machine like a YouTube video from youtubedl or a custom Linux Kernel built on speedy hardware. Because GitHub's all about AI now, I've also included an example of how to run llama2 to answer a bunch of questions using a pre-trained model from Hugging Face.
alexellisuk··on How to Migrate Python Functions from AWS Lambda to OpenFaaS and Kubernetes
Hi, I'm Alex the founder of OpenFaaS.

We've had a lot of interest from vendors about porting functions form AWS Lambda. Why? Their need to deploy their code on-premises and onto other clouds.

We provide a comprehensive guide for Python functions, plus a Node guide at the end of the article.

Han from the team include source code using ffmpeg to transform a full-length video into a preview thumbnail, just like the one you see on openfaas.com

Hope it's useful to you too.

Alex

alexellisuk··on Announcing managed Arm CI for CNCF projects
Hi, this has been a long time coming but I'm now happy to announce a pilot for nominated CNCF projects to get access to our managed Arm CI service. The backing servers are hosted on Equinix Metal and each build runs in an isolated and immutable microVM with Firecracker.

More in the post.

Feel free to reach out to me if you'd like to know more or to nominate a CNCF project you work with.

alexellisuk··on First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi 5
Hi, my name's Alex and my main interest in the Raspberry Pi at the moment is for headless use.

Think containers, Kubernetes, and server-type workloads with systemd and for CI.

That's the viewpoint you'll get from my write-up, but if you like to do other stuff with it, I've linked to a couple of other places too including Jeff's new video on the PCIe port, and the detailed benchmarks by Phoronix.

alexellisuk··on Raspberry Pi 5
I've published a blog post now, with a bit more info and links to other content on the RPi 5 - https://blog.alexellis.io/first-impressions-with-the-raspber...
alexellisuk··on WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
Thanks
alexellisuk··on WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
What did you use to create your graphics?
alexellisuk··on First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi 5
Hi, I'm Alex the author of the blog post.

My main interest in the Raspberry Pi at the moment is for headless use - containers, Kubernetes, server-type workloads with systemd and for CI. That's the viewpoint you'll get from my write-up, but if you like to do other stuff with it, I've linked to a couple of other places too including Jeff's new video on the PCIe port, and the detailed benchmarks by Phoronix

alexellisuk··on Raspberry Pi 5
Hi, I've been testing the RPi5 for a few weeks and have written up my results and benchmarks on Twitter.

https://x.com/alexellisuk/status/1707296079849365650?s=20

This is so much quicker for clusters, servers and headless use, that I don't think I'd consider buying any more RPi4s myself.

alexellisuk··on UTM – Virtual Machines for iOS and macOS
Is running a MacOS VM within scope of what you want to build?
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