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We have Nixstan on "Ops Team" who keeps pushing us to use it. We haven't seen need that much. So can someone give me elevator pitch that if we are CRUD Web App

We have Nixstan on "Ops Team" who keeps pushing us to use it. We haven't seen need that much. So can someone give me elevator pitch that if we are CRUD Web App, why Nix instead of Puppet/Ansible + Docker Containers? Also, this from the blog article: "What if adopting Nix didn’t irritate your IT or security teams?" Too late, security team is already pissed. They did some scan, we pinned a package, it has 3 high severity and it needs to be updated tomorrow. So yea, we are just yoloing package updates, we don't have much of a choice. Oh yea, we have some third party proprietary package we use. Support told us, Red Hat/Rocky/Ubuntu or we could kiss support goodbye. Any suggestions that doesn't involve shoehorning nix into Ubuntu which is like mud wrestling with a pig?

thraxil 2y ago
> So can someone give me elevator pitch that if we are CRUD Web App, why Nix instead of Puppet/Ansible + Docker Containers? For better or worse, Nix forces you to work out the exact dependency tree of your entire system. It can be a pain but once you have it, if one part of that tree changes, nix can rebuild only and exactly the parts of the system that depend on it. That goes all the way through from packages and libraries to systemd services and application config files. That happens safely, reliably, is extremely cacheable, and is done in a way that can actually be perfectly reverted to a previous version. You can build docker images with nix and the result is very small minimal images (it's effectively a `FROM scratch` every time but with a potentially even better layer structure that again can be more cacheable than a typical Dockerfile setup). From a security perspective, Nix can be a huge win since it gives you such precise control over what's installed on your system and makes it simple to track, every part of it checks cryptographic hashes, etc. But yeah, most security teams don't know what to do with it yet and probably don't have the tools to deal with it yet.

thraxil 2y ago

> So can someone give me elevator pitch that if we are CRUD Web App, why Nix instead of Puppet/Ansible + Docker Containers? For better or worse, Nix forces you to work out the exact dependency tree of your entire system. It can be a pain but once you have it, if one part of that tree changes, nix can rebuild only and exactly the parts of the system that depend on it. That goes all the way through from packages and libraries to systemd services and application config files. That happens safely, reliably, is extremely cacheable, and is done in a way that can actually be perfectly reverted to a previous version. You can build docker images with nix and the result is very small minimal images (it's effectively a `FROM scratch` every time but with a potentially even better layer structure that again can be more cacheable than a typical Dockerfile setup). From a security perspective, Nix can be a huge win since it gives you such precise control over what's installed on your system and makes it simple to track, every part of it checks cryptographic hashes, etc. But yeah, most security teams don't know what to do with it yet and probably don't have the tools to deal with it yet.