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Forgive me for using buzzwords, but what's the "cloud native" story on NixOS? Can I easily create containers and update my orchestrator's deployment? Can I abstract things like AWS Lambdas into this immutable build structure?
NixOS is good, if you found not enough documentation, try Guix and may be GuixSD. It uses guile (scheme) and has fantastic documentation. [1] Earlier Nix had additional NixOps but that too now is available with Guix deploy. I am waiting when I can run Guix within a lxd container, shepherd init still has some rough edges with LXD container init. Both are great piece of software and a new take on building OS and distri…
It’s a real shame that rms had such a dislike of Common Lisp. The mind boggles at where the cutting edge of computing would be today had Emacs upgraded from Elisp to Common Lisp twenty or thirty years ago. Instead GNU has spent 27 years trying to turn Scheme into a sufficient systems programming language, once again illustrating the truth of Greenspun’s Tenth Law: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. I would add a corollary: this also applies to any sufficiently complicated Scheme program.
NixOS is good, if you found not enough documentation, try Guix and may be GuixSD. It uses guile (scheme) and has fantastic documentation. [1] Earlier Nix had additional NixOps but that too now is available with Guix deploy. I am waiting when I can run Guix within a lxd container, shepherd init still has some rough edges with LXD container init. Both are great piece of software and a new take on building OS and distri…
How is Shepherd broken with LXC? Is it sufficient to run Guix atop another distribution, or run Guix SD in a qemu VM?
[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2018-10/msg0006...
NixOS is good, if you found not enough documentation, try Guix and may be GuixSD. It uses guile (scheme) and has fantastic documentation. [1] Earlier Nix had additional NixOps but that too now is available with Guix deploy. I am waiting when I can run Guix within a lxd container, shepherd init still has some rough edges with LXD container init. Both are great piece of software and a new take on building OS and distri…
Our organization tried Nix for many years. Most of our problems were around usability, lack of documentation (including zero docstrings or type annotations in nixpkgs), and the overt unfamiliarity of the Nix expression language (asking a whole organization to learn something that seems deliberately cryptic isn't a recipe for success), and a long tail of other things. Still, at its core Nix for package management seem…
This gives me hope things are getting better.
Also recently I funded a project for improving error messages in Nix https://opencollective.com/nix-errors-enhancement
Ther is also now a dedicated Nix Marketing team which are working on improving the website and the documentation
Nix as a build tool is also quite nice, but honestly NixOS is the main attraction for me.
Forgive me for using buzzwords, but what's the "cloud native" story on NixOS? Can I easily create containers and update my orchestrator's deployment? Can I abstract things like AWS Lambdas into this immutable build structure?
You can build docker images with Nix ( https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#sec-pkgs-dockerTools ), but right now it wouldn't make much sense to use the NixOS modules (like nginx) for that. The modules in NixOS assume a systemd based environment and are thus not suitable for use in containers (in the end, most service modules generated systemd units). What you can do, though, is use Nix to build a container image with a…
Forgive me for using buzzwords, but what's the "cloud native" story on NixOS? Can I easily create containers and update my orchestrator's deployment? Can I abstract things like AWS Lambdas into this immutable build structure?
you can take any nixos configuration and turn it into a cloud image https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators
You can take any nix package and turn it into a docker image https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20720922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18111954
You can even use Nix to create and deploy cloud resources ala Terraform:
github.com/nixos/nixops
Some other notable uses of Nix in cloud native landscape:
https://github.com/saschagrunert/kubernix - a KIND alternative
https://github.com/xtruder/kubenix a Nix DSL for defining and deploying entire kubernetes clusters + deployments (combines nix's docker image building support and deployment support for and end to end cloud-native solution)
I personally think Nix should heavily market itself to the CLoud Native buzzword hype train. as it's my favourite weapon in this space
NixOS is good, if you found not enough documentation, try Guix and may be GuixSD. It uses guile (scheme) and has fantastic documentation. [1] Earlier Nix had additional NixOps but that too now is available with Guix deploy. I am waiting when I can run Guix within a lxd container, shepherd init still has some rough edges with LXD container init. Both are great piece of software and a new take on building OS and distri…
Furthermore I do not think you can compare Guix to Nix for commercial work as Nix is LGPL [2] with the packages being MIT [3] where Guix is GPL [4] allowing for Nix derivative work to be used commercially with little restriction.
I wish Guix had stayed as a guile layer for Nix and not gone off in its own direction because of the licensing ambiguity (as far as I can tell this is the reason) in Nix packages. If anyone has more insight on why this split happened or the possibility of making such layers for Nix I'm very interested in this topic.
[0] https://nixos.org/learn.html [1] https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html?channel=nixos-19.09 [2] https://github.com/NixOS/nix#license [3] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/COPYING [4] https://guix.gnu.org/about/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our organization tried Nix for many years. Most of our problems were around usability, lack of documentation (including zero docstrings or type annotations in nixpkgs), and the overt unfamiliarity of the Nix expression language (asking a whole organization to learn something that seems deliberately cryptic isn't a recipe for success), and a long tail of other things. Still, at its core Nix for package management seem…
To me, this is a success story; your organization wasn't sufficiently flexible to adopt new technologies which require rethinking the fundamentals of package management. Take this as a warning sign and re-orient your organization. I do wonder about the "deliberately cryptic" nature of Nix's expression language. It is, in fact, deliberately designed for simplicity, to be a basic syntax for a language that is purely fu…
Not all technologies are good. Not all organisations are good. Sometimes it's one. Sometimes it's the other.
Forgive me for using buzzwords, but what's the "cloud native" story on NixOS? Can I easily create containers and update my orchestrator's deployment? Can I abstract things like AWS Lambdas into this immutable build structure?
I would say Nix's cloud native story is "best in class". you can take any nixos configuration and turn it into a cloud image https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators You can take any nix package and turn it into a docker image https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20720922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18111954 You can even use Nix to create and deploy cloud resources ala Terraform: github.com/nixos/ni…