Alex Ellis Avatar

Alex Ellis

I help companies on their Cloud Native journey. CNCF Ambassador. OpenFaaS Founder.

London, UK · Twitter · GitHub · LinkedIn · Website

Alex Ellis blog.alexellis.io

Docker is deleting open source orgs - what you need to know

Alex Ellis:

Yesterday, Docker sent an email to any Docker Hub user who had created an “organisation”, telling them their account will be deleted including all images, if they do not upgrade to a paid team plan. The email contained a link to a tersely written PDF (since, silently edited) which was missing many important details which caused significant anxiety and additional work for open source maintainers.

He goes on to explain the problem in great details. Btw, Alex is no Docker hater. He has a long history of using and supporting the tech. He goes on to say:

Open Source has a funding problem, and Docker was born in Open Source. We the community were their king makers, and now that they’re turning over significant revenue, they are only too ready to forget their roots.

This decision seems myopic. There are other image hosting options, one of them even shares (inspired?) half of DockerHub’s name… Oh, and here’s our open invitation to the folks at Docker to come on the pod.

Alex Ellis blog.alexellis.io

Do your demos like a boss at KubeCon

Which conference sessions do you remember the most and why? Those with a little theatre, live demos and audience participation are the ones that have stuck with me.

I don’t think that I actually heard the term “live demo” until I went to my first Dockercon event in 2016. The implication was that some demos wouldn’t be run live and would be staged, rehearsed or faked.

We take a quick look at the origins of live conference demos, some of the people who do them best. Then we take a look at why having traffic to localhost may be beneficial to your talk and how you could go about getting real traffic into your local applications.

Alex Ellis blog.alexellis.io

Building an open source marketplace for Kubernetes (2 years later)

It’s 22 months since I found myself frustrated with writing boilerplate instructions to install simple, but necessary software in every tutorial I wrote for clients and for my own open source work.

In this article post I’ll walk you through the journey of the past two years from the initial creation, through to growing the community, getting the first sponsored app and what’s next. There will be code snippets, and technical details, but there should be something for everyone as we celebrate the two year anniversary of the project.

Alex Ellis blog.alexellis.io

The Internet is my computer

In 1984 John Gage of Sun Microsystems was credited as saying “The Network is the computer.” Almost four decades ago, John had a vision of distributed systems working together to be greater than the sum of their parts.

For this article, I surveyed the land of hosted IDEs and it turns out that we’ve progressed beyond running VS Code on an iPad whilst sipping a cocktail.

You can still do that, but there’s way more to it today and I’ll take you through some of use-cases and add my own thoughts. There’s also a practical guide at the end to get started with the open source VS Code browser by Coder.

Alex Ellis blog.alexellis.io

I wrote a book about Everyday Go

This is my third eBook on Go, and it’s one of the ways I’m supporting my time to make open source contributions and lead the OpenFaaS community. The book covers samples, examples and techniques that I’ve learned over the past 5-6 years.

The point is not to be an 800-page tomb with tenuous links between content, but code from real open source applications that are run in production at scale.

There’s been over 300 copies sold already and I’m offering a money back guarantee if anyone should feel it didn’t meet their expectations.

Alex Ellis blog.alexellis.io

My first eBook - results & feedback from "Serverless For Everyone Else"

Alex Ellis:

I wanted to write to you all and share that I’ve launched my first eBook called “Serverless For Everyone Else” - within the first three hours of launch, nobody bought a single copy and I thought that I’d got it all wrong.

Alex digs into the gritty details of why he wrote the book and what happened after his initial failure. And since Alex is super nerdy like you and me, the post is filled with fun moments like this one:

How did I fulfil the upgrade / discount? I did it by writing a function and deploying it to my Raspberry Pi, so that Gumroad would send a webhook, my code would query the dollar amount, and then send out an email to the customer over AWS SES.

Alex Ellis blog.alexellis.io

containerd development with Linux and multipass

About 18 months ago I started a project which had to develop directly against containerd with a full Linux system.

This presented a problem which I’d not really encountered before - Docker and Kubernetes on my Mac were no longer enough, I needed a full Linux environment, and so did the community.

This is how it went and what we learned along the way.

Alex Ellis blog.alexellis.io

The five pressures of leadership

Being a leader is tough and leads to burn-out at least once or maybe even a few times. But why? If you’ve been building, leading, or maintaining open source, then this post from Alex Ellis should be on your “to read” list.

In this post I want to introduce the reader to five pressures that I have encountered over the past five years of building, leading, and maintaining Open Source Software (OSS) with community. This essay is primarily about being a leader in Open Source, but I believe it applies outside of technology too.

My aim is to foster understanding and empathy between contributors, community members, users, and maintainers. I would also like for maintainers and leaders in Open Source to feel a sense of solidarity in their shared burden.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #343

Running functions anywhere with OpenFaaS

We’re talking with Alex Ellis, the founder of OpenFaaS — serverless functions made simple for Docker and Kubernetes. We talked about the back story and details of OpenFaaS, “the curious case of serverless on Kubernetes,” the landscape of open source serverless platforms, how Alex is leading and building this community, getting involved, and maintainership vs leadership.

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