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This mirrors my experience as a developer in an org that used Nix. If you want the dev team to have a strong dependency on the devops team for every little (oft

This mirrors my experience as a developer in an org that used Nix. If you want the dev team to have a strong dependency on the devops team for every little (often unpredictable) aspect of their workflow, Nix is the tool for the job. Don’t get me wrong, I’m completely bought in on the vision of reproducible builds but there’s a long ways to go before it’s usable in real organizations. I’ve heard that some orgs manage it, but I really have no idea how. Maybe some critical mass of people who already know and love Nix (and implicitly packaging obscure dependencies)?

vineyardmike 5y ago
Many orgs get reproducible builds by using different build tools and abstractions. Eg Amazon gets it via their Brazil tool.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I was talking about Nix in particular, but yes, if you’re an enormous and highly lucrative tech company you can pay a team of engineers to build your own reproducible build tool. If the same team is very talented they can probably even get Bazel working. ;) But I don’t think any large orgs at all use Nix, presumably because it doesn’t scale beyond a small number of (enthusiastic) developers.
hitpointdrew 5y ago
> If you want the dev team to have a strong dependency on the devops team for every little (often unpredictable) aspect of their workflow, I have never used nix, but from the article the author only concentrated on the fact that docker and nix create reproducible environments, and completely misses the other benefits of containers. As a devops guy if someone hands me a nix project, how do I deploy that so it is highly available and scales by itself? With containers I just put it in kubernetes.
- Nullabillity 5y ago
  You can use Nix as a better docker build, see https://grahamc.com/blog/nix-and-layered-docker-images https://grahamc.com/blog/nix-and-layered-docker-images or https://nixery.dev/ https://nixery.dev/.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    The dream is using something like Nix to not only reproducibly build a container image but also all of the infrastructure manifests which reference it. I _think_ this is achievable in Nix if you're willing to deal with all of the pain of actually using Nix; however, this would depend on pushing an image to a container registry as part of the Nix build and I'm pretty sure that violates Nix's idioms/conventions? I've certainly never heard of anyone building their entire infrastructure manifests this way.
    - Nullabillity 5y ago
      > The dream is using something like Nix to not only reproducibly build a container image but also all of the infrastructure manifests which reference it. I _think_ this is achievable in Nix if you're willing to deal with all of the pain of actually using Nix; We did that at an old job. Basically, Nix built images + K8s manifests + a script to push the images. Our CI job boiled down to `nix-build && ./result/push-images && kubectl apply -f ./result/manifests -R`. This is similar to how NixOS' nixos-rebuild boils down to `nix-build && ./result/activate`.
    - verdverm 5y ago
      See https://dagger.io https://dagger.io, the next gen tool by the creators of docker that does this. CUE + BuildKit
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  That's because nix is not a docker alternative. I'd love a nix-like docker alternative to be fair but that'd be a massive undertaking.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    What is a "nix-like docker alternative"? Is that "using Nix to build container images"? Because Nix already does that.

vineyardmike 5y ago

Many orgs get reproducible builds by using different build tools and abstractions. Eg Amazon gets it via their Brazil tool.

throwaway894345 5y ago
I was talking about Nix in particular, but yes, if you’re an enormous and highly lucrative tech company you can pay a team of engineers to build your own reproducible build tool. If the same team is very talented they can probably even get Bazel working. ;) But I don’t think any large orgs at all use Nix, presumably because it doesn’t scale beyond a small number of (enthusiastic) developers.

hitpointdrew 5y ago

> If you want the dev team to have a strong dependency on the devops team for every little (often unpredictable) aspect of their workflow, I have never used nix, but from the article the author only concentrated on the fact that docker and nix create reproducible environments, and completely misses the other benefits of containers. As a devops guy if someone hands me a nix project, how do I deploy that so it is highly available and scales by itself? With containers I just put it in kubernetes.

Nullabillity 5y ago
You can use Nix as a better docker build, see https://grahamc.com/blog/nix-and-layered-docker-images https://grahamc.com/blog/nix-and-layered-docker-images or https://nixery.dev/ https://nixery.dev/.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  The dream is using something like Nix to not only reproducibly build a container image but also all of the infrastructure manifests which reference it. I _think_ this is achievable in Nix if you're willing to deal with all of the pain of actually using Nix; however, this would depend on pushing an image to a container registry as part of the Nix build and I'm pretty sure that violates Nix's idioms/conventions? I've certainly never heard of anyone building their entire infrastructure manifests this way.
  - Nullabillity 5y ago
    > The dream is using something like Nix to not only reproducibly build a container image but also all of the infrastructure manifests which reference it. I _think_ this is achievable in Nix if you're willing to deal with all of the pain of actually using Nix; We did that at an old job. Basically, Nix built images + K8s manifests + a script to push the images. Our CI job boiled down to `nix-build && ./result/push-images && kubectl apply -f ./result/manifests -R`. This is similar to how NixOS' nixos-rebuild boils down to `nix-build && ./result/activate`.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    See https://dagger.io https://dagger.io, the next gen tool by the creators of docker that does this. CUE + BuildKit
jokethrowaway 5y ago
That's because nix is not a docker alternative. I'd love a nix-like docker alternative to be fair but that'd be a massive undertaking.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  What is a "nix-like docker alternative"? Is that "using Nix to build container images"? Because Nix already does that.