Alex Ellis

It's now been ~ three years since I left my job and full-time employment to focus on OpenFaaS - on making functions easy to use and portable between clouds - https://blog.alexellis.io/openfaas-bright-2019/ Here's a bit about how it's going for me this year in 2022. Hope you also enjoy the book recommendations if you're into personal development like I am, or are thinking of starting something.

Hey Alex I just wanted to say that I read your blog with pleasure! Thanks for all the sharing https://blog.alexellis.io/

I've found k3s (https://k3s.io/) to be extremely easy to use for setting up and running kubernetes on a group of Raspberry Pis. Specifically, I followed this guide to get my clusters up and running quickly and it's worked out pretty well: https://blog.alexellis.io/test-drive-k3s-on-raspberry-pi/

With regards to image update management, personally what I wish to do for my Yocto image is to have it be: - Small enough that it fits into RAM. - Fetched over the network on boot, PXE-style. - Configured to not write any files to the greatest extent possible, and where writing files can not be avoided one would use tmpfs. With the above three criteria satisfied, the following is achieved: a) We never write to an SD card so we avoid SD card corruption issues. b) Since the whole system image is sitting in RAM, we could do without NFS, Samba or similar either. We do need to persist some data, but that data is coming from our application and is going to be stored in a database on a server on the local network. I am currently working on developing the application that our image will run, but I have dug up some preliminary information relating to what I said above: - Read-only Raspberry Pi [1]. Applies to Raspbian but certainly provides a starting point for doing the same thing with Yocto. - Poky NFS Root [2]. Like I said, I don't need the NFS root part if the image can fit in RAM, but the portions that deal with gPXE might certainly be relevant. - The State of Netbooting Raspberry Pis (December 2017) [3]. "Net-booting works well on the Raspberry Pi B Model 3 without an SD Card." So actually we won't be needing gPXE. - Network Boot Your Raspberry Pi [4]. Referenced by [3] and provides the steps needed to configure Raspberry Pi 3 for network booting without an…

Any chance you could look into potentially adding the option to use PVM (eg so a PVM mode instead of KVM) in your matchlock/firecracker implementation? See https://blog.alexellis.io/how-to-run-firecracker-without-kvm-on-regula…

I have 2 questions which I hope can be answered Firstly, can there be an easier way to stop a microVM mid execution in this single executable bottlefire format and then rerun that and it would start mid execution. (something akin to how criu does it?) Secondly, and although this isn't related to your product but rather about microvm and that is if something like microvm could be run in normal cloud infrastructure? I saw this article (https://blog.alexellis.io/how-to-run-firecracker-without-kvm-on-regula… and It mentioned PVM and I was thinking if this can be applied here because then I feel like if I can run a container as a microvm on big cloud and then stop it mid execution and rerun it elsewhere, then I have essentially got an incentive to use spot instances which are (I think) 80% more cheaper and I am just curious about it from a devops side of things.

The Snapdragon 3xc Gen 3 one needed a downstream kernel and community effort: https://github.com/merckhung/linux_on_arm64_laptop#microsoft-dev-kit-2… (initially there was some bring-up trickery that led to Linux not booting past Grub, but OpenBSD working fine: https://blog.alexellis.io/linux-on-microsoft-dev-kit-2023/ ) Re: Microsoft, Secure Boot should be disable-able and the devices are ServerReady. As close to an open platform as it gets in ARM land. Other than that, we're on our own, unless Qualcomm will help with their mainlining efforts. That'll be almost enough for the DevKit, but the upcoming Snapdragon X laptops have lots of additional stuff besides the SoC itself.

Didn't Docker actually try it earlier this year, e.g., https://blog.alexellis.io/docker-is-deleting-open-source-images/?

They should be credited for their actions post bait and switch: immediately admitting fault [1] and reversing their decision. A stark contrast to another recent bait and switch pulled by SalesForce on Heroku customers. [1] https://blog.alexellis.io/docker-is-deleting-open-source-images/

The recently released OpenBSD 7.2 boots and installs on it, support for the same Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC used in the ThinkPad x13s was added during last release cycle, so support for the Microsoft Dev Kit 2023 came for the most part for free. https://www.openbsd.org/72.html OpenBSD developer Patrick Wildt shared boot messages (dmesg) here: https://twitter.com/bluerise/status/1585584481854816256 Another UK tech reviewer Alex Ellis showed it booting OpenBSD into X11: https://blog.alexellis.io/linux-on-microsoft-dev-kit-2023/

One-shot jobs are one of the reasons why I moved from Kubernetes to Nomad[0]. It feels overengineering absurdity that there is no more straightforward way to do it. Nowadays, I'm back to Docker Swarm and loving it. It seems you did something similar before for Docker Swarm [1] btw, nice ;-) [0] https://www.nomadproject.io [1] https://blog.alexellis.io/containers-on-swarm/

Thank you for sharing! I looked around and found this cool link: https://blog.alexellis.io/state-of-netbooting-raspberry-pi-in-2021/

I coulnd't understand the idea. This would be a better link I think: https://blog.alexellis.io/the-grow-lab-challenge/

but you cant run x86 containers... https://blog.alexellis.io/5-things-docker-rpi/

you can run a kubernetes stack using k3s on a rpi stack within minutes. and it runs far better than all of these. https://blog.alexellis.io/test-drive-k3s-on-raspberry-pi/ here's a live walkthrough - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjpVtNjiXSU

Whenever I hear 'cluster' I think of scientific computing applications and wondering how these fit in there. The author addresses a nice use case in another post: https://blog.alexellis.io/build-your-own-bare-metal-arm-cluster/#35dor…

That is true, and it's also mentioned in the article, under heading "Getting It" https://blog.alexellis.io/docker-for-mac-with-kubernetes/#gettingit

OpenFaaS have the option of running Java functions in an "Afterburn" mode to mitigate against the JVM startup time. https://blog.alexellis.io/openfaas-serverless-acceleration/

This is an English speaking forum, so you will get more luck with the English translation: http://blog.alexellis.io/functions-as-a-service/ [Hi from Argentina!]

This bubbled up the other day which was interesting as well. https://blog.alexellis.io/building-containers-without-docker/ It does seem like Docker will be holding back containers from achieving their true promise, as it flounders looking for profitability and chasing k8s. Its sad that we're still moving around tar balls without advancing some of the tooling around it. One of my biggest gripes as a non-k8s container user are that we are still keeping all this versioned cruft with every container. I would like to see an easier way to just get the latest binaries not dozens of tar hashes with versions going back to the first iteration of the container. Probably closer to singularity https://singularity.lbl.gov/ Another area is the ability to update containers in place. Hass.io https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/ does some of this with the ability to manage the container version from within the container, but seems like a little bit of a hack from what I've seen. Watchtower is closer to what I'd like https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower, but why can't we have a more integrated system built into the default tooling?