Talk: 16:15-17:00 (English)
Cloud, done the nix way
Nix has proved to be a revolutionary advance in packaging. In addition to packaging, the core idea has also been succesfuly applied to machine configuration (with NixOS), and to programming languages (Unison). Given how fruitful these applications have been, it’s natural to ask whether there are others.
In this talk, we’ll ask how to do cloud infrastructure the nix way. The core idea will be a hash-based service-addressing: the way we contact a service is not via a identifier for a machine (an IP address), nor a mutable pointer to a machine (a service URL), but instead a hash URL that is unique to the machine configuration (the hash of all the software and configuration in a machine).
Suddenly, many of the problems of distributed systems become much easier. Deployments with zero downtime, where every request is handled to completion, services are terminated promptly and in the right order, there is no overprovisioning, and we have an exquisitely fine-grained control and understanding of API compatibility issues.
As part of this investigation, we’ll go through what the core idea of Nix is, and how it relates to similar hash-based technologies such as git, docker, and unison. You’ll learn about infrastructure and deployment philosophies and techniques, how to adjudicate which notions of identity work best in a given settings, what input-addressed and content-addressed hashing are and why you should care, and more.
Julian Kirsten Arni
Julian is a Haskell and Nix developer working at garnix.io, and Artificial Labs. He was one of the original authors of the Servant web framework. In previous lives, he was a philosopher, and Brazilian U16 chess champion.
