alexellisuk

This is the third anniversary for inlets (I'm the founder). My blog post sums up features added, changes made and a bit about the community and use-cases.

We'll see more of these "Year in Review" posts in the coming days, but why read mine? If you're interested in business and entrepreneurship, I'm living that life and talk about my experiences and learnings. You'll also get some decent book recommendations. But if you've ever read my content before or use one of the OSS projects I maintain, I talk about some of those too and cap it off with an update on OpenFaaS. Hope you enjoy it.

Note: submitting again to see if there's interest here, as there was on my Twitter account.

We'll see more of these "Year in Review" posts in the coming days, but why read mine? If you're interested in business and entrepreneurship, I'm living that life and talk about my experiences and learnings. You'll also get some decent book recommendations. But if you've ever read my content before or use one of the OSS projects I maintain, I talk about some of those too and cap it off with an update on OpenFaaS. Hope you enjoy it.

Different use-case.

See the FAQ for a comparison vs a VPN: https://docs.inlets.dev/reference/faq/

Sure:

https://inlets.dev

And the docs:

https://docs.inlets.dev

Subscription only, companies can buy a static licenses if required.

I started an OSS project to enable me and my team to receive webhooks at a big co where Ngrok was banned and so was SSH. It works over an HTTP proxy using websockets. One of the requirements I had was for 1st class container support - so it could be run inside a K8s pod and support LoadBalancers for TCP traffic as well as HTTPS. The OSS project was very popular, but drew very little sponsorship. I then pivoted to a commercial license and got some more sign-ups, but not as many as I wanted - companies were happy to pay up front for a one year static license, but individuals and home users were not.

So I introduced a personal tier that was covered for commercial use - inspired by Jetbrains and added a monthly subscription option for it. Both of those actions helped increase usage and signups with personal users. Companies still tend to want to pay for a year.

Even though this is completely self-hosted software, developers seem to like paying for tools monthly. Some abuse this by cancelling the subscription in the months they don't expect to use a tunnel, or opening the software then cancelling the subscription and waiting until the process has to restart before re-subscribing. Not much I can do about this side of it.

If people are interested, the product is called inlets and is easy to find on the Internet. I also write about my OSS and independent business work each week in a subscription newsletter using GitHub Sponsors (another side project, if you like)

Books I could recommend: Monetizing innovation, Obviously Awesome, 1-Page Marketing Plan & Minimalist Entrepreneur. I'm not affiliated with any of these titles, but consider them core reading for indie devs and for side gigs.

> - Some customers had network equipment that capped the length of time of that a TCP connection could remain open, interfering with the preferred operation

What's the alternative that's going to work here?

I had lots of fun developing Black and White film with commercial chemicals. They are cheap enough, but do expire. Caffenol works reasonably well, and because it's made from dry ingredients doesn't really go off.

The main issues I had were around the reels for loading film ready for the tank. 26-frame rolls were usually fine, but 26-frame often buckled. Stainless Steel reels were much worse and stuck together. For sale if anyone is interested!

This has been one of the most popular blog posts of the year on the inlets domain since it was published by Johan back in the summer. I wanted to share it with Hacker News.

What are you using for multi-cluster Kubernetes deployments and monitoring?

I thought this article was interesting and in keeping with what I've seen posted on Hacker News. Do we know why it was flagged without comment after being upvoted?

Yesterday an openfaas user asked me how he could deploy functions to a private VPC on AWS. This is what I came up with - three options, one of which is using inlets, which I created to integrate deeply with Kubernetes.

Someone recently bought me a copy of Dopamine Detox via my Amazon Wishlist. It's an easy read and gives some suggestions for how to start reclaiming your attention and have purpose in your days. I'd recommend it.

Hi, I maintain the open source project OpenFaaS.

If you've not seen Ivan's content before and are interested in cloud and containers, I'd highly recommend having a read of his articles. Several have been on the front page of Hacker News and rightly so - he's got an accessible writing style and includes plenty of diagrams.

One way I use the project is for extending a SaaS like Gumroad - to add new tiers of discount or to alert myself via Slack. It could be useful for one of your side-hustles or for some integration that just gets out the way. Ivan covers how you can write functions with regular binaries or bash, or one of the templates from the open-source community.

I'm the maintainer of OpenFaaS and know Ivan.

This is a case study by Ivan @ Booking.com who you may seen several times on the front page of Hacker News speaking about the deep workings of containers. If you've not seen his content yet, have a browse through what he's written up. Great diagrams and easy to digest content.

Hi, I am the author of OpenFaaS and the newer edge version called "faasd". I'd like to know whether you've consider running functions at the edge or on-premises and whether this workflow with GitHub Actions + GHCR would be useful to you?

> It seems to be a project and a commercial vision with tremendous potential, one that investors see as a pivotal piece of the cloud puzzle and are willing to pour in significant capital to help build.

Monetising open source is something that I've struggled with. Can you speak to the business model, Matthias?

I have been quite tempted by the reMarkable2, but reviews like this are the ones that make me think twice.

When I got an iPad Pro in early 2018, I was of course taking all of my notes with it - from meetings, to ideas, to task lists. At some point I went back to paper and the iPad was relegated to ideation. Exporting is not great, in an ideal world there'd be a fast export of PDFs, but I found myself emailing them or Slacking them to myself to share ideas.

The iPad's screen is glossy and gets finger grease onto it, the 1st gen pencil isn't the most natural in the hand. I know you can get matt screen protectors, but I like to use the iPad as a tablet. There's no substitute for paper, but I do find indexing and going back to ideas more challenging.

As an owner of many RPis and an M1 mac, I wonder what the target market is for this?

I have stopped using the aluminium ones which tend to go bad, very fluffy and rusty-looking. The Stainless steel models seem much cleaner over time and only need new rubber seals. Unless you forget about it on the hob and melt down the handle (don't do this!)

These build logs can sometimes make playing with RPis look rather complicated. It doesn't have to be. Here's a guide I wrote for getting productive and running some code on your newly minted cluster (an often forgotten step) - https://alexellisuk.medium.com/walk-through-install-kubernet...

I'm the original creator of faasd, and just found this post on the Internet. What I liked was how he discovered faasd and found some unique value in it.

I wanted to share it all with a broader audience here. His bootstrap is a little bit convoluted, if you check out GitHub, we have a simple installer script and an eBook as a reference manual.

I'm not sure what the author means when he says it's complicated, but installing faasd requires almost no knowledge of containers, and there are very detailed step-by-step instructions. Once it's up and running, it's pretty much the same experience as openfaas on Kubernetes, just without scaling and clustering.

https://github.com/openfaas/faasd

If you're after software engineering and not structural, then I have a fair amount of blog posts on Go, Kubernetes, Docker and OSS software - https://blog.alexellis.io/

You'll also find insights from building my own products and revenue in my weekly sponsors emails -> https://insiders.alexellis.io/ - I often post book reviews and learnings, like last week on copywriting and tangible vs intangible benefits.

(Hi, I'm the creator of inlets). This is an case-study from Nathan Peck from the containers team at AWS showing how his approach for using inlets to get HA, scalable Ingress into an ECS Anywhere lab.

Hi, I created inlets out of a need to get HTTPS and TCP tunnels behind firewalls and tricky network conditions. I also needed first-class integration with Kubernetes and containers to be available.

Today I've relaunched the docs website to be clearer on use-cases and tasks to be done. This is in contrast to the older site which some people found confusing due to the amount of information and links present.

If you're interested, I also asked Twitter what they think makes for a great docs site: https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1458776636040560648?s...

> Welcome to the new inlets documentation site launched Nov 2021. This rewrite aims to be less verbose, to connect you with practical task-driven examples and to make it easier to find what you need. If you have comments, questions or suggestions, please let us know on GitHub.

The tool used to generate the site is mkdocs with material as the theme. This is a move from the excellent docsify - which unfortunately didn't have user-friendly URLs and was hard to get indexed by Google.

Yuck and.

> So Ofcom is proposing clearer, stronger rules to safeguard a phone box against removal, if any of four criteria applies:

>its location is not already covered by all four mobile networks; or it is located at an accident or suicide hotspot; or >more than 52 calls have been made from it over the past 12 months; or > exceptional circumstances mean there is a need for a public call box.

Seems to be reasonable criteria if accepted.

I built a feature in arkade [1] to pull in binaries for CLIs for infrastructure and developer tooling that I wanted to use - it now has 72 CLIs that you can pull down with a single command and most importantly, as near to instantly as you're going to get.

For instance: arkade get kubectl@v1.22.1 yq helm faas-cli

It's not got anywhere near the catalog of brew, and doesn't compile software, or help you find lib-xyz for your Yubikey, but it is really fast and has a growing community behind it.

It works on MacOS, Linux, Windows and arm hosts to determine the correct download URL and pull in a binary.

[1] https://github.com/alexellis/arkade

Contributions are welcome.

This reminds me of Microbadger that Liz Rice started with some of her friends. It's very similar.

I like the integration with CVEs.. So what's the longer term vision here for contains.dev?

https://github.com/microscaling/microbadger

Don't blame me. The idea came from Martin Woodward (from GitHub) and I was surprised how I had it up and running, executing builds in a few minutes.

What kinds of things would you run with yours? Maybe you could use a GitHub action to trigger IoT lights on and off.

I know many of you may be wondering if you should get one of these, and if they can be used to create a cheaper cluster than RPi4s. I try to answer that as well as talk about my experience with the RPi Zero and how quick it is with Go and Node.js compared to the older generation.

Are you running Zeros now or other models? What would you run on an RPi Zero 2?

Curious to see almost no maintainers, and very little empathy in the 2018 comments.

Hopefully that'll change in this posting.