NixOS and Stateless Deployment

Re:NixOS and Stateless Deployment by cwp on Monday January 05, 2015 @12:03AM (#8837382)

Yes and no. It's true that immutable servers work around the flaws in puppet et al.

However, nix still still really useful even when you have immutable servers. Once the components of an app are described as nix packages you have a lot of flexibility in working with them:

  • deploy to a local sandbox for development
  • deploy to virtualbox instances for end-to-end testing 
  • deploy to cloud instances for testing or production

..all from the same package descriptions. I've found it really valuable to have a precisely-defined and exactly reproducible environment for my code, whether in development, testing or production.

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Re:NixOS and Stateless Deployment by nXqd on Monday January 05, 2015 @12:38AM (#8837476)

deploy to sandbox, virtualbox o cloud instance is just a small change of ip address in Ansible. This is convenient, but in my point of view it's not really important. The way nixOS provisions new system is great, there is no doubt about that. But the process of making an immutable system to me, it's a bit tricky. In nixOS, for now you cannot debug a provisioned system without doing it "properly". And it takes time. It would be great if nixOS has debug mode for nix package manager, I think it's not so hard. For Ansible (and etc ..), you can debug and note it down, then change the playbook, destroy the old one and up new one. It may cost the same time.

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