Interested in letting the user choose between MicroOS and NixOS ?

[prinzdezibel]

Hi guys,
hi @mysticaltech, @phaer, @aleksasiriski

I wonder if you are interested in letting the user choose the underlying OS for the cluster.
I don't have a lot of experience with MicroOS and it happens that I really like NixOS. So I thought it would be really nice to use it on all my servers. At the same time I'm very much in love with the fine terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzner project. Thank you for your hard work and all the effort you put into it.

To have the best of both worlds I added the possibility to use NixOS as node operating system.

My motivation was something along these lines:

Both OS give you the possibility to rollback to a known good state in case of a failure. But they take a different approach. While MicroOS offers a read-only, immutable root filesystem where updates are applied atomically, NixOS is not strictly read-only, but offers very good build reproducibility and rollback capabilities its through declarative system configurations known as generations.

If you find an immutable system too restricted but you still want rollback functionality, you may find NixOS a perfect alternative. Additionally, NixOS provides unparalleled reproducibility. If a system configuration runs on your machine, there's a very good chance it will on any other.

So in case you think my work does align with your project goals, I would be happy to file a PR.

Have a look here: /~https://github.com/prinzdezibel/terraform-hcloud-nixos

Michael

[phaer]

Hi @prinzdezibel Is there a specific reason you tagged me here? While I am somewhat active around NixOS nowadays, I haven't contributed anything to terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzner in several years.

[prinzdezibel]

Hi Phaer, no that was for no specific reason. I tagged you, because I thought you three guys were in charge of the project.

[phaer]

Ah I see, GitHub still lists me rather prominently because I contributed quite a bit in the early days of this project.

But I just checked: my last commit here was on Jun 7, 2022. Since then I lost all use-cases for a private k8s cluster :)

[mysticaltech]

Though for matters about NixOS, you're the man @phaer. Hope all is good brother 🙏

[mysticaltech]

@prinzdezibel I would be really curious to see how this works. My priorety is keeping the project simple enough to maintain, but I would definitely take a look at your fork if you make support for NixOS happen.

[prinzdezibel]

Sure. Check out /~https://github.com/prinzdezibel/terraform-hcloud-nixos for more details. At the moment, it misses autoscaling and autoupdate features from terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzner, because I don't need those for my use case. But other than that it's functional and testable. The base images for the snapshots are built from another project of mine: /~https://github.com/prinzdezibel/nixos-qemu-image
As a default, those are used when deploying the cluster, but you also could build your own NixOS qcow images, if needed.