Alex Ellis
- title
- Alex Ellis
- type
- entity
- summary
- Founder of OpenFaaS/Actuated/Inlets; blogs on self-hosted infra and local AI economics at blog.alexellis.io
- tags
- person, blog, self-hosted, local-models
- created
- 2026-07-21
- updated
- 2026-07-21
Alex Ellis is a bootstrapped founder working in cloud-native and self-hosted infrastructure. He started OpenFaaS in 2016 (a serverless framework for Kubernetes), built by hand as most software was at the time, then funded the work through an open-core company after a stint at VMware. His products cluster around Linux primitives: containers, Firecracker microVMs, network protocols, tunnels, CLIs.
The current lineup: OpenFaaS (functions on Kubernetes), SlicerVM ("the missing API for Linux" — AI sandboxes and microVMs), Actuated (self-hosted CI runners for GitHub and GitLab), and Inlets (self-hosted HTTP/TCP tunnels). Everything is written in Golang, with some React UI components. He also built Superterm, a tool for tracking tmux coding sessions, itself written entirely by coding agents in 2026.
His blog at blog.alexellis.io covers self-hosted infra, serverless, and — more recently — the economics of running local models inside a small software business. His writing on local AI is distinctive because he has a real cost ledger to point at rather than a benchmark screenshot: enterprise customers with data-control clauses, an RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell that had to justify its own price, and specific tasks where a local model earned its keep and specific ones where it looped for half an hour burning electricity.
Ingested articles
- local-ai-is-not-opus — why "local Qwen is near-Opus" is wrong, but a tuned local model still delivers bounded value for a small software business