Hey all, I’m wondering about giving NixOS a try. It seems like it’s mostly marketed for development environments and CI, but I haven’t seen much of anything about it being used on production servers. Right now I manage Alma 8 servers with Salt, and bootstrap Salt with a modified version of the ISO. NixOS seems like it could help streamline how I do things. Does anyone use it and have thoughts one way or another?
Thank you for your extremely thoughtful response. One thing I need to research for myself is how user data, configuration, etc. is handled with a rollback. In MicroOS, the system itself is snapshotted by default (/etc for example) but user data (/home) is not. I would assume that a rollback would not touch the user data, so an upgrade could break that (e.g. database migration performed by a package update).
If you’re always able to roll back, is taking the time to build and run a VM really worth it except for very critical maintenance windows? Does the VM just copy the nix config or the data too? Today, I use Vagrant for testing my Salt states. It does what I need.
I don’t come from functional programming, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out. Would have been nice for it not to have its own language, but I suppose that’s most efficient instead of repurposing / abusing another language in a weird way.