61 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
61 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Nixos Subjectively"
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date: 2023-08-31T08:30:14+03:00
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---
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Previously I [bloggged]({{< ref "log/2023/end-of-summer.md" >}}) about the cool
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things I did with NixOS. After publishing the post, my friend promptly asked:
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> Wondering what's your professional take on NixOS. Would you give it a short
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> for a small-to-medium size server fleet provisioning? It felt rather involved
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> and not very mature when I looked at it. Kind of a commitment, too.
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Here is my response:
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> My journey to NixOS has been bumpy ride: it's been over a year since I looked
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> at first, and I still sometimes feel I did not escape the beginner level. The
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> learning curve is steep, and it is best to take it on gently or have a good
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> mentor nearby. I started by installing NixOS on my primary laptop, which was
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> a mistake. The annoyance of "I can do this in Debian in 5 seconds, and I am
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> an hour in without an end of sight in this thing" was very discouraging at
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> times.
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>
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> I reinstalled my laptop back to Debian and took a few slow months to
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> provision 2 personal servers (the thing that's detailed in the blog). Taking
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> it slow has been fantastic experience. The folks in Matrix are very helpful
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> where documentation, especially high-level, is patchy. Now I feel comfortable
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> enough to retry NixOS on my laptop again.
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>
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> Recently I realized that what I originally perceived as immaturity later
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> turned out lack of knowledge and/or lack of high-level documentation.
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> Technicals are good. Granted, I have found some bugs (though trivially
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> [fixed][nixos-prs]), but they mostly come from the power to configure it and
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> thus the huge surface area. Also, variety does not help: for example, there
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> are [10 deployment tools][deployment-tools] in the wiki ("nixops related"
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> counts too). It is hard to choose when I don't know what to expect, much less
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> know what's possible. It is also nontrivial to ask for a "high-level" advice:
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> a beginner will just tell their favorite system, not knowing the trade-offs
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> or alternatives. An expert will tell "depends on what you want to do". Moving
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> beyond such answer requires time and a beverage, which brings it's own
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> constraints. In this concrete case, I spent quite some time learning krops,
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> which later turned out to be a dead-end. Later moved to deploy-rs, which
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> turned out to be a good decision so far.
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>
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> As far as recommendations go. For smaller companies, especially where
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> developers are also taking care of operations/deployments/infrastructure, I
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> can't recommend NixOS enough. For medium-large size companies it would
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> certainly bring a lot of value (I can already see how many things mine or my
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> sister-team at Uber had to re-implement which come out of the box in NixOS),
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> but, like with anything that has a different paradigm, requires a mentality
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> shift, which may be very hard organizationally.
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>
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> There is at least one large-ish company I know that uses NixOS
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> ([proof][canva]). I did not look, I found it by accident. I also know a few
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> folks in Tweag; their primary consulting stream is helping companies onboard
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> to Bazel and/or Nix. They won't tell who they are, but there are "quite a
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> few, of different sizes, flying under the radar".
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[nixos-prs]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Amotiejus+is%3Aclosed
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[deployment-tools]: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Applications#Deployment
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[canva]: https://opencollective.com/canvaofficial/expenses/115338
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