Optimising Docker Layers for Better Caching with Nix
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Re: Optimising Docker Layers for Better Caching with Nix
#2Great post on the issues of Docker's linear layering method (which a tweet[1] by the author of the post also explains well independently of computers) and how to improve on it with Nix.
The "old" way of building Docker images with Nix also provided some of these benefits, but for quick builds often ended up being slower due to the dependency on qemu. This is an awesome improvement on that!
I'd recommend people building & deploying a lot of Docker images (especially in languages with many dependencies on native libraries and such, which can be tricky to get right but which Nix mostly just handles for you) to see if building images with Nix could improve your workflow!
Re: Optimising Docker Layers for Better Caching with Nix
#3Tried this out on the day it was released, and it's been awesome so far.
Usually structuring images would take a lot of manual tweaking to get the layers just right, but with this I just adjust the number of layers and watch magic happen :)
Average push size down from over 300MB to 15MB for an image of over 1.4GB, and takes like 15 lines of code to write.
Re: Optimising Docker Layers for Better Caching with Nix
#4Nix and Docker integration is almost optimal now, no other tooling provides that type of functionality
Re: Optimising Docker Layers for Better Caching with Nix
#5I really like this. I think it is a great compromise between the limitations of docker and everything packaged in one file while taking advantage of nix. I'm curious about one other optimization that could be made.
You could instead look at the dependency graph of several nix docker builds and increase the cache reuse even more from that.
Re: Optimising Docker Layers for Better Caching with Nix
#6Wouldn't a multi-stage dockerfile fix the problems of having N layers or is it N for the entire file?
Re: Optimising Docker Layers for Better Caching with Nix
#7Neat. It seems like Nix could become the preferred way to build Docker images, if it's made a bit more user friendly. It's hard to beat the simplicity of
FROM ubuntu:latest
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y mysql phpRe: Optimising Docker Layers for Better Caching with Nix
#8Nix and Docker integration is almost optimal now, no other tooling provides that type of functionality
[Habitat](http://habitat.sh/) builds on the concepts in Nix, and here is a relatively old experiment I found on optimizing Docker layering with it: https://github.com/chetan/habitat-dockerize-layers
Re: Optimising Docker Layers for Better Caching with Nix
#9Neat. It seems like Nix could become the preferred way to build Docker images, if it's made a bit more user friendly. It's hard to beat the simplicity of FROM ubuntu:latest RUN apt-get update RUN apt-get install -y mysql php
I'm very optimistic about Nix. If you haven't read it yet, I suggest starting with this article:
https://www.infoq.com/articles/configuration-management-with...
I also gave a talk about why I'm excited about Nix:
Re: Optimising Docker Layers for Better Caching with Nix
#10Neat. It seems like Nix could become the preferred way to build Docker images, if it's made a bit more user friendly. It's hard to beat the simplicity of FROM ubuntu:latest RUN apt-get update RUN apt-get install -y mysql php
"Simplest" can be subjective. There's not much that can compete with editing your nixos config file and adding
services.mattermost.enable = true;
# nixos-rebuild switch