Meet Alex Ellis
Alex Ellis is a cloud-native developer, entrepreneur, open-source maintainer, speaker, and author focused on developer-first infrastructure. He creates and maintains tools including OpenFaaS, Slicer, Actuated, Inlets, k3sup, and arkade, with a strong emphasis on serverless platforms, Kubernetes, Firecracker microVMs, CI/CD, Go, Linux, and self-hosted infrastructure.
Summary of Alex Ellis and his portfolio
Alex Ellis is a cloud-native developer, entrepreneur, consultant, open-source maintainer, conference speaker, and author. His portfolio positions him around a clear theme: developer experience first — building software that is easy to operate, portable across cloud and on-premises environments, and gives users more control over their infrastructure.
His main technical focus areas are:
- Serverless platforms
- Kubernetes and containers
- Firecracker and microVMs
- Self-hosting and bare-metal infrastructure
- CI/CD with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Jenkins
- Go, Linux, Raspberry Pi, and homelab-style systems
Alex is best known as the creator and maintainer of OpenFaaS, a self-hosted serverless framework for running functions and microservices on Kubernetes and other infrastructure.
Portfolio website
The alexellis.io site is a concise personal/portfolio landing page. It highlights his products, open-source projects, eBooks, blog, and consultation/contact options. The tone is strongly product-led: Alex presents himself as someone building practical infrastructure tools for developers, teams, and cloud-native operators.
The site links to his long-running blog, titled “Cloud Native & Open Source,” which has a large archive of technical writing. Recent posts cover microVMs, Firecracker, Kubernetes, self-hosting, Linux hardware, GitHub Actions, and LLM/agent infrastructure.
Main products
Alex’s current product work includes:
- OpenFaaS — a serverless platform for deploying event-driven functions and microservices to Kubernetes without repetitive boilerplate.
- Slicer — a tool for turning Linux bare-metal hosts into isolated Firecracker microVMs, useful for local development, production workloads, Kubernetes testing, and isolated execution environments.
- Actuated — a CI platform for GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Jenkins where jobs run in ephemeral microVMs on the user’s own hardware.
- Inlets — a private tunnelling tool for exposing local HTTP and TCP services through a VM or Kubernetes cluster.
A recurring theme across these products is self-hosted infrastructure with strong isolation and portability, especially using Firecracker microVMs.
Open-source projects
His featured open-source projects include:
- k3sup — a tool to bootstrap Kubernetes with k3s over SSH, going from zero to kubeconfig quickly.
- arkade — an open-source marketplace/installer for developer tools, positioned as a fast way to get binaries like Helm, k9s, and others.
- inlets-operator — a Kubernetes operator for adding TCP load balancers to private or local Kubernetes clusters.
He also invites sponsorship through GitHub Sponsors, and some of his newer tooling, such as Slicer Home Edition and K3sup Pro, is tied to sponsorship/community access.
Writing and technical interests
Alex’s blog is a major part of his portfolio. It shows both product work and hands-on technical exploration.
Notable recent posts include:
- Preview: Slice Up Bare-Metal with Slicer — explains how Slicer partitions bare-metal machines into Firecracker microVMs for Kubernetes testing, production workloads, CI, autoscaling, and isolated environments.
- How to run Firecracker without KVM on cloud VMs — explores running microVMs on cloud VMs without nested virtualization, including KVM-PVM and AWS/Hetzner cost comparisons.
- I wrote a replacement for GitHub’s code review bot — describes a self-hosted AI code review bot using GitHub Apps, LLMs, and Slicer-managed microVM isolation.
- I Bought An N100 Mini PC, Then Another — shows his practical R&D workflow using small Linux machines, K3s, OpenFaaS, Firecracker, Actuated, and Slicer.
His writing style is practical and experience-driven: he often starts with a real infrastructure problem, explains trade-offs, compares tools, and shows how he built or tested a solution.
Books
The site also promotes several eBooks:
- Serverless for Everyone Else — practical OpenFaaS/serverless guidance.
- Everyday Golang — real-world Go programming techniques.
- Netbooting the Raspberry Pi — guidance for network-booting Raspberry Pi devices, useful for clusters and managing multiple boards.
These reinforce the same themes as his blog: Go, serverless, Kubernetes, Raspberry Pi, and self-managed infrastructure.
Social profiles
Alex links to these social profiles from his portfolio and blog:
Overall impression
Alex Ellis is a deeply hands-on cloud-native engineer and entrepreneur whose work sits at the intersection of developer tools, serverless, Kubernetes, microVMs, and self-hosted infrastructure. His portfolio is less about showcasing client projects and more about presenting a coherent ecosystem of products, open-source tools, writing, and educational material.
The strongest through-line is autonomy for developers and teams: avoiding lock-in, running software on your own infrastructure, improving CI performance and security, and making complex systems like Kubernetes and Firecracker easier to operate.