Infrastructure as Code

Introducing NXD: Declarative Infrastructure Reconciliation for Nix-Authored State NixOS solved the operating system. It did not solve what the operating system runs on. My hosts are pure functions of pinned source. The Proxmox cluster underneath them was configured by clicking. The Headscale tailnet they join was enrolled by hand. The PBS appliance holding their backups had its retention policy stored in a web UI and nowhere else. I had perfect reproducibility above the hypervisor and none below it — and the seam between the two is exactly where my outages came from. ...

My NixOS Journey: From Arch Linux and FreeBSD to Declarative Configuration I ran Arch Linux for years because I wanted current packages, and FreeBSD alongside it because I wanted a system that stayed put. Both worked. Neither answered the question that kept costing me weekends: when a machine breaks, how do I get the exact same machine back? On Arch, the honest answer was a wiki page of my own notes and some muscle memory. On FreeBSD it was a tarball of /etc and more muscle memory. Both are reconstruction from evidence, not reproduction from a source. NixOS was the first system that let me answer the question with a command instead of a memory. ...