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Unfortunately there’s no shortcut other than investing several hours reading tutorials and then repeatedly breaking stuff on your own machine until you start to

Unfortunately there’s no shortcut other than investing several hours reading tutorials and then repeatedly breaking stuff on your own machine until you start to understand. It’s worth it though. There’s something magical about having an entire machine configured declaratively.

rgoulter 5y ago
I think it's comparable to using Terraform. If you're only setting up one server in some cloud, then probably it's easier to just set that up through the admin dashboard compared to setting up Terraform. For such a limited usecase, the benefit of "infrastructure as code" is that at least what you've got is documented. But with using Terraform, all sorts of use cases are then enabled beyond what you'd want to manage manually. Using Nix instead of manually installing a bunch of stuff seems fine either way. But stuff like nix-shell paired with direnv seems pretty neat.
- bspammer 5y ago
  I actually really agree that Terraform is a good analogy - you're frontloading the effort in a way that hopefully will make things easier in the future. I use Terraform to manage my own personal AWS account. Recently I needed a Windows VM to run some random exe file. I could have created an EC2 instance adhoc through the web console but I did it through terraform instead. It probably took me about 30 minutes longer than it would have otherwise, but now I've got that terraform module ready to go if I ever need a windows instance again in the future. It's got a properly configured security group that only allows access from my VPN, and it outputs the IP and admin password automatically. I'll never have to solve that problem again (well, for a few years if we're being realistic).
exdsq 5y ago
Sadly in a truly Nix'd up DevOps environment it takes so much more time than 'several hours'. I got to grips with a local NixOS computer - that was fine - but when you're working with 10kloc Nix environments it's just so so hard to grasp.

rgoulter 5y ago

I think it's comparable to using Terraform. If you're only setting up one server in some cloud, then probably it's easier to just set that up through the admin dashboard compared to setting up Terraform. For such a limited usecase, the benefit of "infrastructure as code" is that at least what you've got is documented. But with using Terraform, all sorts of use cases are then enabled beyond what you'd want to manage manually. Using Nix instead of manually installing a bunch of stuff seems fine either way. But stuff like nix-shell paired with direnv seems pretty neat.

bspammer 5y ago
I actually really agree that Terraform is a good analogy - you're frontloading the effort in a way that hopefully will make things easier in the future. I use Terraform to manage my own personal AWS account. Recently I needed a Windows VM to run some random exe file. I could have created an EC2 instance adhoc through the web console but I did it through terraform instead. It probably took me about 30 minutes longer than it would have otherwise, but now I've got that terraform module ready to go if I ever need a windows instance again in the future. It's got a properly configured security group that only allows access from my VPN, and it outputs the IP and admin password automatically. I'll never have to solve that problem again (well, for a few years if we're being realistic).

exdsq 5y ago

Sadly in a truly Nix'd up DevOps environment it takes so much more time than 'several hours'. I got to grips with a local NixOS computer - that was fine - but when you're working with 10kloc Nix environments it's just so so hard to grasp.