Nix Flakes in Production: What, Why and How

Nix Flakes in Production: What, Why and How - Alexander Bantyev
2020-10-16 cfp.nixcon.org...
At Serokell, we have been using Nix for over 5 years. In the last half-year, we have started an effort to use flakes to build our infrastructure and projects. In this talk, I would like to give a refresher on flakes, explain why we are so excited about them and share experiences, thoughts, and advice on the matter.

[@Ancipital_]

Thank you for this presentation. You have put in a lot of work into it. I hope users who are not as new as I am to the topic can comment on its usefulness and their willingness to implement this on their own systems. To me flakes seem very dense, extremely difficult and unintuitive. But maybe this is just my lack of experience. As an old school system administrator I have been looking into this as well as NixOS as a whole, because I am considering to switch our production systems to NixOS (and flakes by extension), but the learning curve seems very steep, and, it seems to turn system administration into a job for programmers. So just speaking for myself I am not against learning new things of course, but I am a little much overwhelmed and put off by it. Hopefully others can comment. Thank you.

[@vaap]

felt weird how almost every slide was narrated with "its quite simple" "very easy to understand" "obvious" but im left decently confused

[@jakedespppp]

nix moment

[@fabiandrinksmilk6205]

I think that might also be because flakes are demonstrated with all of its use cases while expecting you to know about each one. You should probably first establish what you want to use flakes for, like managing NixOS configurations or packaging an application and learn flakes for that use case first.