week 5: diogotc-tmbpe demo proposal

[diogotcorreia]

Assignment Proposal

Title

Declarative and reproducible deployments with NixOS

Names and KTH ID

• Diogo Correia ([email protected]) @diogotcorreia
• Tomás Esteves ([email protected]) @Pesteves2002

Deadline

Week 5

Category

Demo

Description

NixOS is an immutable Linux distribution that aims to be reproducible and declarative thanks to the underlying Nix functional language. Through the Nix language, it is possible to declare all aspects of a system, ensuring that the result will always be the same, no matter when or where
the system configuration is deployed. Other properties of NixOS include easy rollbacks, dependency pinning for each package, specialisations, cleanup of previous configurations, and more.

In this demo, we will show the audience how to deploy a fully-configured NixOS system in seconds, using tools like nixos-anywhere to bootstrap the installation and disko to declare disk partitions.

Relevance

NixOS (and the associated Nix language and Nixpkgs package repository) are the pinnacle of Infrastructure as Code, allowing for a system to be completely defined through Nix code. This makes similar deployments extremely easy and scalable, as Nix code can be shared between many hosts. Additionally, updates to packages and configuration can be performed in bulk or in a CI/CD system and copied to the resulting systems.

[algomaster99]

Hi @diogotcorreia ! Very nice demo and I am looking forward to it.

[algomaster99]

@diogotcorreia @Pesteves2002 there is also a cool paper on this - Reproducibility of Build Environments through Space and Time. If you ever see me in person in lecture or lab, do reach out to me, I would love to discuss more on such topics! 😄