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No, thanks. Any person with experience on large, critical infrastructure knows the importance of being able to make changes locally to investigate an incident.
by goodpoint 5y ago
No, thanks. Any person with experience on large, critical infrastructure knows the importance of being able to make changes locally to investigate an incident.
- aequitas 5y agoIt's better to think of these kind of systems as Disposable infrastructure instead of Immutable infrastructure. The difference being is that you occasionally, temporary can accrue some state on a machine (eg: debugging, hotfix), but you are accustomed to the idea that you can indiscriminately dispose of any system without worrying about state present on the system. So after you're done debugging, you just throw away the system and have a new replacement build automatically (by autoscaling or similar systems).
- hinkley 5y agoYour theory is that the third thing you tried and only the third thing you tried fixed the problem. To test that theory you have to recreate it, which you do by modifying the baseline. You're gonna find out real fast if #2 was also required to fix the problem. Or you can find out in four months when the servers need a fix for an advisory.
- goodpoint 5y agoYes. Even better if something tracks and shows you the changes. Etckeeper does that for /etc using git. It can even push/pull changes. And something else can update or rollback software deployments. Apt, yum, zypper do that just fine.
- bo0tzz 5y agoI don't think there's anything that stops you from doing that? You can edit the running system the usual way AFAIK. Even better, afterwards you can just reset the box and all your changes are automatically cleaned up.
- joepie91_ 5y agoNot to mention that since systems are deterministically built, you can usually reliably reproduce the failure mode on a separate system and investigate it there. "Hey, what's the store hash of the thing that's failing, so I can grab it and reproduce it locally" is a thing you can just do with Nix.
- unicornmama 5y agoManaging NixOS system is an organizational pain in the ass. Virtually everyone knows Ubuntu. Virtually all vendors provide some sort of standard supported deployment like Docker or Ansible. Now anyone who’s affected by a NixOS deployment either has to spend months learning Nix or escalate to the a handful of gurus.
- whateveracct 5y agoIt's not hard to become a NixOS guru if you work somewhere that uses it..only thing blocking most people in my experience is a stick up their butt.