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**Domen Kožar:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** You said they're complementary, and you use them together that way. |
**Domen Kožar:** So there is an official Nix image where you have Nix installed, and you can build stuff inside the Docker containers. But there is also an API in Nix language, so that you can build images with Nix... Which is pretty cool as well, because you will get very minimal images compared to stacking them up, a... |
\[40:09\] You have whatever you build, which depends on something else, and which depends on Alpine, Linux and so on. So this quickly adds up. Whereas if you go through the Nix route, you just build your thing, and then you copy that into the Docker container, and it has nothing else, essentially. It's also potentially... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I saw a cool example on the examples screencast, where it was setting up a Docker image that had a specific tool, where it showed three versions. It was like the stock Nix version, stock Debian, and then the Alpine Linux; these were the containers, the images. And at first, the Alpine Linux one w... |
That kind of speaks to the thing that you like about it - it's convenient by default, but then it also has the customizability where you can have the pre-built binaries, you can just use that, no big deal; you don't have to compile everything, but when it comes time to say "You know what - I really wanna strip this thi... |
**Domen Kožar:** That is one of the most powerful things... For example, going back to the Firefox -- let's say you would package Firefox in a Docker container... Each package is essentially just a function of all the dependencies it needs. OpenSSL is a parameter in that function, and so on. So you could, say, `openssl... |
So I think that's really powerful, compared to if you then go tweak those Docker images and trying to rebuild them, which are not exactly reproducible, and so on. It becomes a mess pretty quickly. |
**Jerod Santo:** A couple of the other features that I'm not sure we've hit on exactly, that I think play into the ops side, is you list remote builds and remote deployments. What exactly do you mean by remote deployments? |
**Domen Kožar:** Yeah, maybe that's a weird way to put it... As I said previously, you can control where it's built, and you can then deploy from one machine to 20 others, for example. Now, Nix will either copy what it needs there from your local machine, or it will substitute from a binary cache. So really, remote the... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[44:03\] And what would be an example of why you'd wanna do that? Would it be for cost savings on the wire, or caching? For what reason would you want to do that? |
**Domen Kožar:** So you're saving all the research. Usually, the way you're deploying is optimized for the runtime features of your thing... A very good example of this is if you have a Raspberry Pi - you kind of don't want to compile stuff on Raspberry Pi. You would want to compile on an EC2 ARMv8 machine. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right... |
**Domen Kožar:** So then, essentially, it doesn't require any extra disk space. The thing you copy to the Raspberry Pi is exactly what the system needs, so it's really fast... This is as fast as it gets from getting a system up and running. You copy it over and you activate it, you start a script and that's it. You don... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Domen Kožar:** Also, it doesn't interfere with the system that much... So if something's running there and it's really on the edge, it's essentially untouched that way. |
**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. That Raspberry Pi is a very good example; that clarifies to me why that would make sense to wanna do that. Cool. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Where's the interesting things happening around Nix? If Nix has been around for 20 years, and we're now at roughly year 20(ish) of its inception, when you look at the ecosystem at large, where are the cool things happening? What's happening, what's being done that's sort of bleeding edge around thin... |
**Domen Kožar:** Right. That's a pretty broad question. One of the things that I've been doing in the last 4-5 years is -- I think we need to build infrastructure and documentation. Those are the two main things I'm working on. In other words, I think we should go into commercialization, or what I like to put it, to go... |
Also, on the community side there's a lot going on. We had a couple of conferences... So the community is growing pretty fast. We are having issues with actually a lot of people coming in, so we're trying to do more policy stuff, so that we can grow faster and less chaotic... And on the research side, there is a bunch ... |
\[47:56\] So maybe Bash is not the best example, but let's say if you would modify Git, and then Firefox depends on Git, then Firefox output probably wouldn't change, even though you have changed Git... So Firefox wouldn't change, and anything that depends on Firefox then wouldn't need to be recompiled, for example. |
There is a really cool paper called Build Systems a la Carte, that unfortunately doesn't have Nix inside, but it compares different build systems and different features they have, and Nix will then tick all the feature boxes once this feature is complete... And be, essentially, I would say, better than Bazel in that se... |
Another thing is there is a bunch of work on the usability side... It was clear that it was a research project, so Eelco Dolstra and also a bunch of people from the community are redesigning the command line so that it's easier to use. So I think we're kind of, again, in the phase of bringing it closer to the wider aud... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. You mentioned a lot of growth is happening now in terms of community... Are you familiar with where that growth is happening, potentially? Like, where it might be coming from... I know that a lot more people are using Raspberry Pi's, for example; I know that Nix has that support. A lot of ho... |
**Domen Kožar:** I think the biggest one right now is actually the Haskell community, because it's so closed, conceptually, to Nix. I would say most - this is probably a hard statement, but most of Haskell teams are using Nix to deploy or build Haskell, one way or another. |
A bunch of other languages where this is useful, as well... I would say there's a bunch of people in the Rust community, and other languages as well. And I think in DevOps, especially deploying and managing systems - I think there are more and more companies using Nix, because of this reproducibility part and just assu... |
Well, actually, my friend Nate told me this one, and I really like this concept - you know, Nix is kind of like when we had PHP and you would hack on the live server, and all of that. That was back in the day considered as an accepted practice. It's the same with Nix now... So if you go to a Nix machine and you just tr... |
\[51:00\] So Nix kind of turns operational tasks into development tasks, so you kind of have to pay this cost upfront, of actually describing your system in one file, and so on, which takes some time... But once you do that, you save a lot of operational problems. We see a lot of people figuring this out in the wild, a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. If someone's listened this far, they're like "Man, this is interesting/somewhat interesting to me", whatever, what's your go-to place to get started? Is it nix.dev, is it another place? Where do you send people to -- obviously, they've maybe gotten past the reproducible builds, understanding... |
**Domen Kožar:** Yeah, I'm still working on Nix.dev. I think it is a great place to start, although it's not complete yet, so there are parts that are missing... The typical place to start is to read the NixOS manuals; there is a Nix manual which is specific to the language and package manager, and a NixOS manual which... |
But those manuals are not tutorial-like. They're more like reference documentation, and description of different bits of NixOS and how it works... And that's where I would like Nix.dev to be the middle ground, where you have tutorials to get started with. |
So I think between those two, if you wanna go really deep into Nix as a language and how it works, there is something called Nix Pills, where it kind of goes into different parts of Nix and explains the concept behind it... |
And there's on YouTube a few people who have recorded videos, and there's Nix Shorts, which is like short tutorials of getting started with doing stuff with Nix... I think that's everything that comes to mind right now. The main one I would still say NixOS manuals, if you wanna get your hands dirty. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. We'll link those up in the show notes. NixOS.org is kind of a good landing page, but we'll link deeper into, say, manuals, and Pills, and obviously link up Nix.dev, and we'll look up Nix shorts on YouTube. |
I've found something else - I think it may be a false positive, but we'll dig further and provide awesome links. Listeners, you can find that in the show notes... |
Domen, thank you so much for this deep-dive on Nix. It's interesting... I've never personally used it, but I can certainly see the reproducible builds idea around it, especially the usability around ops, and you want systems you're putting out into production to be secure and stable, and be able to count on those, so I... |
**Domen Kožar:** Thank you for hosting me. |
• Kaizen: the concept of continuous self-improvement and improvement of processes |
• Reflection and improvement of the Changelog setup and show |
• Importance of regular retrospectives and feedback loops |
• Fastly CDN outage and its impact on the Changelog's infrastructure |
• Switching to a Linode host and removing Fastly from the picture |
• Experience with 99.96% uptime after the outage and cutover |
• Discussion of the importance of being prepared for and responding to outages |
• Miscommunication about downtime and Jerod's day off |
• Discussion of recent downtime incident with Fastly and its impact on analytics |
• Importance of redundancy and reliability in infrastructure and services |
• Potential solutions for improving redundancy and reliability, including using multiple CDNs and cloud providers |
• Trade-offs between cost, complexity, and benefits of implementing redundancy and reliability measures |
• Technical challenges and limitations of implementing redundancy and reliability, including issues with stats and analytics. |
• Discussing the limitations of using Cloudflare and the potential benefits of multi-CDN |
• Managing incidents and creating a way to document and share lessons learned from them |
• Dealing with a current incident involving a missing DNS token and the resulting certificate renewal issues |
• Implementing an activity log for services with multiple users to track important actions and prevent similar incidents |
• Deletion of an access token without clear activity log |
• Discussion of the need for consensus or multiple approvals for sensitive actions |
• Proposals for managing incidents, including tracking and communicating historical events |
• Examination of the DNSimple platform and potential improvements, such as automated token management |
• Exploration of incident management strategies and the role of proactive monitoring |
• Discussion of the benefits of instant management and shared knowledge among team members |
• Incident management and awareness |
• Runbooks: codified steps for specific tasks and incidents |
• Automation vs. manual processes |
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