This is part 1 of x in a series.
I have spent most of my life avoiding DevOps-y type things. At GitHub I got familiar enough with kubectl to help debug the applications I had deployed on it, but that was almost a decade ago and I don’t remember a single bit of it.
Most of the things I run I deploy with a really simple systemd unit definition in the Nix module. Here’s an excerpt from the one for the Elixir app this blog ran on:
{
systemd.services.kv = {
description = "kv";
enableStrictShellChecks = true;
wantedBy = [ "multi-user.target" ];
after = [ "kv-migrations.service" ];
requires = [
"postgresql.service"
"kv-migrations.service"
];
script = ''
export KV_STORAGE_ROOT="$STATE_DIRECTORY"
${envVarScript}
${cfg.package}/bin/kv-server
'';
serviceConfig = {
User = cfg.user;
ProtectSystem = "strict";
PrivateTmp = true;
UMask = "0007";
Restart = "on-failure";
RestartSec = "10s";
StateDirectory = "kv";
StateDirectoryMode = "0750";
};
inherit environment;
};
}
It’s very basic, and it worked beautifully! I love that, with NixOS, you can package a reproducible build (with all its dependencies), deployment strategy, and configuration schema all in one place. It’s so damn clean, and it works wonderfully for homelab- or personal services-scale systems. (For more, try Xe’s All Systems Go! talk, Writing your own NixOS modules for fun and (hopefully) profit.)
The downside is that this is not exactly a high-availability setup. When any of the dependencies of a service like this change — such as a new cfg.package, or change in environment — the result is that the existing service is stopped, the service is swapped out, and then the new one is started.
There can often be 10–30 seconds between the stop and start, depending on how much else the nixos-rebuild has to do. And while a failing build won’t leave you with a stopped service — you won’t even get that far — if the build succeeds, but the new service fails to come up for some reason, then you’ll be scrambling fast.
This being NixOS, getting your service back up is as easy as switching to the previous generation, and can be done very fast, but still, it’s not great. Realising this, and still very much wanting to use Nix as a build orchestrator in places where this isn’t an acceptable trade-off, it was time to learn a devops.
Structurally, Kubernetes seems relatively sound, giving us language for defining the shape of a deployed system upon many different axes. It is very YAML and it is very containers, neither of which I am the hugest fan of, but I felt pretty sure there would be tools to help with the former, and Nix my beloved has beautiful solutions for the latter.
If, like me before the start of this exercise, you don’t really know about the model Kubernetes gives you to work with, you might find useful David Ventura’s blog post, A skeptic’s first contact with Kubernetes. If I had found it before and not immediately after coming this far it would’ve been super helpful -_-
One thing worth mentioning is that, as a Very Nix Person (and Very Dissociated Person), I really need my infrastructure to be described in a version-controlled way. Ideally, I would be able to tie all of my infra back into the same place (which is vyx, a Nix flake).
So I decide to start up a cluster and begin experimenting. I hate Docker, Inc. with a passion — I will never forgive them for getting rid of Docker for Mac’s cute whale — plus I want to learn somewhere where I can actually deploy things, so I decide to start with k3s on my VPS. How I chose k3s to begin with, I’m not so sure — maybe because it has relatively few options exposed in its Nix module. Lightweight sounds good, and it’s a “certified Kubernetes distribution”. Whatever that means, it must be good!
NixOS has the option services.k3s.manifests, which is described as “auto-deploying manifests”. Perhaps this is the magic sauce I need to get my infrastructure as code!?
(The answer is, no, it isn’t — the entire cluster is restarted when you change its values, because NixOS. Teehee.)
Nonetheless, I struggled through writing some early manifests this way. Writing YAML in Nix is way better than writing YAML, and very easy to parameterise, extract functions, and so on. I had seen mention of Helm charts here and there, and while I felt like one day I would need to come to terms with them, I preferred to leave that until as late an opportunity as possible. As a bonus, using k3s auto-deploying manifests in this way meant I could write a NixOS module to deploy an application in Kubernetes, without a single line of raw YAML.
So, terrible in many respects — now bringing down an entire cluster on each change instead of just the relevant services (!!!) — but an introduction nonetheless. We are now at the point of siguiente:
- Decided to turn that homelab server into a gaming PC instead, haha psyche! Instead decided to learn better how to cross-build things and operate k3s without trying to shove everything through a NixOS module.
Part 2 will cover building our own software ready for orchestration (using Nix — we won’t write a single Dockerfile, promise, and as a little bit of a spoiler, we won’t write a single Go template either), and the unique fun presented by developing on aarch64-darwin while largely deploying to x86_64-linux. :)
