Request for a cluster access for development & integration testing for NixOps + Proxmox

RaitoBezarius commented 1 year ago

First and Last Name

Ryan Lahfa

Email

ryan ⋅ lahfa @ xyz

Company/Organization

Independent Contributor

Job Title

Magician of all stacks

Project Title (i.e., a summary of what do you want to do, not what is the name of the open source project you're working with)

NixOps for Proxmox & Proxmox on NixOS.

Briefly describe the project (i.e., what is the detail of what you're planning to do with these servers?)

Currently, I work on https://github.com/RaitoBezarius/nixops-proxmox as much as I can, as it is very complicated to have a testing cluster (I use my own homelab which run also other services in tandem for that).

The biggest issue is managing the fact that I need to have streamlined/stateless configurations to run proper tests and verify the code is indeed working and is not in a very special case.

I would like to have resources to help this project running, at the same time, it would pave the way for packaging Proxmox Debian packages in NixOS and would let me test this new combination of two.

Is the code that you’re going to run 100% open source? If so, what is the URL or URLs where it is located? What is your association with that project?

Yes, see above: https://github.com/RaitoBezarius/nixops-proxmox + https://github.com/nixos/nixpkgs.

What kind of machines and how many do you expect to use (see: https://metal.equinix.com/product/servers/)?

c3.small.x86 for integration testing and development
a3.large.x86 for performance test once in a time (with official request in this issue for example).

What operating system and networking are you planning to use?

NixOS / Debian and I am planning to use advanced networking features such as SDN using https://nlnet.nl/project/p4-nix/ if possible, which would be enabled by having Proxmox on NixOS.

Any other relevant details we should know about?

I already had #122 which I did not really use because the one-off shot machines were not really enough for the security audit and NixOps moved a lot during that time, so I decided to use my own hardware during this time.

But at the moment, as I am moving forward some projects such as SecureBoot for NixOS, I am very interested into this.

vielmetti commented 1 year ago

@RaitoBezarius A few things to think about for this.

AFAIK neither NixOS nor Proxmox are CNCF projects, so this falls in the third category here (from the README)

Priority is given first to CNCF projects, then to developers from CNCF member companies and then to any open source developer.

We've generally had the best luck from projects that have had 2 or more contributors, in part because of the typical complexity of cloud native projects, but also from an organizational standpoint there are benefits to having the responsibility be shared.

Equinix Metal does have first-class NixOS support, with NixOS 22.05 available.

RaitoBezarius commented 1 year ago

@RaitoBezarius A few things to think about for this.

AFAIK neither NixOS nor Proxmox are CNCF projects, so this falls in the third category here (from the README)

Priority is given first to CNCF projects, then to developers from CNCF member companies and then to any open source developer.

We've generally had the best luck from projects that have had 2 or more contributors, in part because of the typical complexity of cloud native projects, but also from an organizational standpoint there are benefits to having the responsibility be shared.

Understandable ; currently, nixops-proxmox is too "early" to be used due to many edge cases which are difficult to treat because of a lack of access to a Proxmox cluster I can reset a lot of times (hence the need of "baremetal cloud" or to acquire such a machine and maintain it myself, etc.). Actually, technically, nixops-proxmox had two contributors (me and a surprising contribution), but there is indeed no two core contributors.

The reasoning is the following: if I had more resource to maintain it and get it to beta-grade or even production-grade, I could promote it to a nix-community project and could onboard easily more contributors to make it a more "first class" citizen in NixOps.

Equinix Metal does have first-class NixOS support, with NixOS 22.05 available.

Indeed, but nixops-proxmox act at another level: providing a nixy Terraform alternative to the Proxmox backend for people who do not want to run Nomad, for example.

Having first-class NixOS support is very useful if I tackle bringing Proxmox onto NixOS so that deploying a whole cluster becomes indeed defined in one single expression that can intertwine: hypervisor-level desired state and vm-level desired state.

Nevertheless, I would understand if I had to wait or if it would not be a good fit!

I have no idea how much burden does it put on you to have a dedicated c3.small.x86 instance for this integration testing, but those would be the most impactful for the project and I would completely understand if it's too much.

If you think I should retry/reopen this issue in the future once I have more contributors and I feel constrained, I can also do that!

vielmetti commented 1 year ago

My recommendation @caniszczyk is that we hold off on this for now and close this issue out.

@RaitoBezarius my recommendation for resources would be to engage the "Summer of Nix" project described at https://summer.nixos.org which I anticipate will run again in 2023 - there's a lot of support resources in that 2 month effort which would be excellent for an undertaking like this.

caniszczyk commented 1 year ago

Yep, -1

Let’s close

On Mon, Jan 23, 2023 at 7:53 PM Edward Vielmetti @.***> wrote:

My recommendation @caniszczyk https://github.com/caniszczyk is that we hold off on this for now and close this issue out.

@RaitoBezarius https://github.com/RaitoBezarius my recommendation for resources would be to engage the "Summer of Nix" project described at https://summer.nixos.org which I anticipate will run again in 2023 - there's a lot of support resources in that 2 month effort which would be excellent for an undertaking like this.

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RaitoBezarius commented 1 year ago

My recommendation @caniszczyk is that we hold off on this for now and close this issue out.

@RaitoBezarius my recommendation for resources would be to engage the "Summer of Nix" project described at https://summer.nixos.org which I anticipate will run again in 2023 - there's a lot of support resources in that 2 month effort which would be excellent for an undertaking like this.

Hi, thank you for the answer. I do not think that Summer of Nix is a good fit for such a project nevertheless as it is catered for newcomers in Nix (and I am not really). I will ask if the project will evolve in that sense, but it's not built to provide infrastructure resource for community projects to the best of my knowledge.

This is unfortunate as there is not really good options to get hardware to run this kind of project beyond self hosting it through our own funds, so I will buy a baremetal machine x86 and put it towards this goal. :)

cncf / cluster