[JasonSage]

Your success with this strategy correlates more strongly with ‘Go’ than ‘100 services’ so it’s more anecdotal than generally-acceptable that you can run 100 services locally without issues. Of course you can.

Buying the biggest MacBook available as a baseline criteria for being able to run a stack locally with Docker Compose does not exactly inspire confidence.

At my last company we switched our dev environment from Docker Compose to Nix on those same MacBooks and CPU usage when from 300% to <10% overnight.

[ikety]

Have any details on how you've implemented Nix? For my personal projects I use nix without docker and the results are great. However I was always fearful that nix alone wouldn't quite scale as well as nix + docker for complicated environments.

I've used the FROM SCRATCH strat with nix:

https://mitchellh.com/writing/nix-with-dockerfiles

Is that how you implemented it?

[adamdecaf]

Buying the biggest Mac’s also lets developers run an electron app or three (Slack, IDE, Spotify, browser, etc) while running the docker-compose stack.

[JasonSage]

You're right. My coworkers remarked that they could run Slack and do screensharing while running the apps locally when we removed docker-compose.

[stealthybox]

That's a huge win -- has your team written about or spoke on this anywhere?

[JasonSage]

No but I'd be happy to (I maintained the docker-compose stack, our CLI, and did the transition to Nix).

[stealthybox]

I'm curious about the # of svc's / stack / company / team size -- if you have your own blog -- would love to read it when you publish

could be a cool lightning talk (or part of something longer)

maybe it's a good piece for https://nixinthewild.com/ ?

I'm @capileigh on twitter and hachyderm.io if you wanna reach out separately -- here is good tho too

[JasonSage]

Hey, I plan to reach out when I get some time :)

I can see there’s interest in the topic.

[stealthybox]

sounds good! it's a cool anecdote :)

[codethief]

Hi Jason! Like many others here I'm looking forward to that blog post! :-)

For now, could you elaborate on what exactly you mean by transitioning from docker-compose to Nix? Did you start using systemd to orchestrate services? Were you still using Docker containers? If so, did you build the images with Nix? Etc.

[JasonSage]

When we used docker-compose we had a CLI tool which developers put in their PATH which was able to start/stop/restart services using the regular compose commands. This didn’t accomplish much at the time other than being easy to remember and not requiring folks to know where their docker-compose files were located. It also took care of layering in other compose files for overriding variables or service definitions.

Short version of the Nix transition: the CLI tool would instead start services using nix-shell invocations behind pm2. So devs still had a way to start services from anywhere, get logs or process status with a command… but every app was running 100% natively.

At the time I was there, containers weren’t used in production (they were doing “App” deploys still) so there was no Docker target that was necessary/useful outside of the development environment.

Besides the performance benefit, microservices owning their development environment in-repo (instead of in another repo where the compose configs were defined) was a huge win.

[codethief]

Thanks for elaborating!

By pm2 you mean https://www.npmjs.com/package/pm2 ?

[JasonSage]

Yep!

[stealthybox]

the pm2 thing via a custom cli is interesting

several nixy devtools do some process management now

something we're trying in Flox is per-project services run /w process-compose. they automatically shutdown when all your activated shells exit, and it feels really cool

[adamdecaf]

I’d like to learn more about switching compose to nix. We will hit a wall with compose at some point.