My experience with NixOS
blog.patchgirl.io
My experience with NixOS
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Re: My experience with NixOS
#2NixOS 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 distribution. They are ahead of their time might take another 4-5 years before they become more mainstream.
Re: My experience with NixOS
#3Forgive 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?
Re: My experience with NixOS
#4NixOS 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?
Re: My experience with NixOS
#5Forgive 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 an nginx config. You just can't use the abstractions present in NixOS as-is to generate the nginx config, you'd have to write the nginx config yourself (just as you would if you use a Dockerfile). You could perhaps re-use parts, or modify the NixOS modules, though.
Re: My experience with NixOS
#6NixOS 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 seems like the future; I just have no confidence that they're going to iron out those issues in the next 4-5 years.
Of course, none of that speaks to Guix as I haven't used it, but hopefully it's awesome and solves all of those problems.
Re: My experience with NixOS
#7I'm yet to see a backend app architecture that both is elegant and effective from developer perspective and at the same time doesn't push her to make unneccessary database calls for each request when business logic becomes significantly complex.
Re: My experience with NixOS
#8Forgive 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?
Chef Habitat might be more what you're looking for in that regard, it very much feels like an intellectual derivative of NixOS and focuses on the cloud native story
Re: My experience with NixOS
#9We used their build system Hydra at a previous company and all of our deployments were on NixOS.
Check this video out from Rob Vermaas. It's a decent case study of how Nix was applied at LogicBlox
Re: My experience with NixOS
#10NixOS 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…
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 functional and lazy but not much else ([0] p69). When folks complain about the Nix expression language, as they often do, I ask them: What would you change? How would you do it?
I think that it is bad that an entire team does not have the bandwidth to learn an entirely new language, but good that the team is not willing to spend time on things which they don't think are important.