[Nix-dev] NixOS and NixOps on server : testimonials here ?

[Ben Doyle]

I'm a bit late to this thread, but I thought I'd add my experience.

At work we use NixOps to manage about 15 machines. This mostly works pretty
well, and it's a huge advance over anything manual.

Three main issues. The big one is that at any moderate sort of scale you
start having cross-cluster resources --- in our case, stuff like a varnish
cache/load balancer and a build server --- and NixOps doesn't really help
you with that. It'd be great if a NixOps network were a tree, with
subclusters, rather than a flat set.

Second, nixpkgs itself becomes a chunk of state that your deployments
depend on, and nixpkgs changes pretty fast, even from a
small-and-hopefully-nimble startup's perspective. We've ended up using
submodules and such; fine-ish, but inelegant. I don't really have a
suggestion here --- mostly it's good that nixpkgs moves fast, of course.
It's something to be aware of.

The third gripe is that nixops nix expressions can be tricky to debug. (I
miss static types every day...) The suggestions upthread about small files
are good; likewise, nix-repl is your friend.

Mostly it's pretty great! Have fun,

Ben



On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 9:56 AM, Aycan İrican <iricanaycan at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> > On 24 Jun 2015, at 16:32, Fabien Bourgeois <fabien at yaltik.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi there,
> >
> > I'm a newcomer to Nix ecosystem and am theoretically really pleased
> > about manuals and articles I've read about it.
> >
> > I will really soon give it a try and if tests fulfill my needs, I'd like
> > to be able to use NixOS "everywhere" (workstations, servers). I have
> > some questions about using NixOS on servers machines in production (I
> > guess this list is not exhaustive :
> > https://nixos.org/wiki/Nix%28OS%29_in_production )
> >
> > 1) Have you experiences about using NixOS on physical or virtual servers
> > ? Do you have some advice to share ?
>
> We’re using NixOS on Leaseweb’s dedicated server (HP DL180) without any
> problems. Though installing NixOS using ILO was pretty boring.
>
> > 2) Do you follow stable or unstable channel ? Why ? (security,
> stability…)
>
> I am using master nixpkgs branch on my desktop since I regularly modify it
> and I want to follow upstream changes. I prefere stable branch on
> production systems mainly for low maintenance cost.
>
> > 3) Are there here some NixOps users ? How many servers are you deploying
> > to ?
>
> I am currently using libvirtd backend for bringing up a test network as
> quickly as possible to run tests.
>
> Regards,
> _______________________________________________
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> nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl
> http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
>
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