Best practices for multi-host system configuration

tweag / nix-hour

Questions for the weekly Nix Hour

MIT License

78 stars 3 forks source link

Best practices for multi-host system configuration #17

Closed soupglasses closed 9 months ago

soupglasses commented 1 year ago

This is partly inspired by the latest episode, where nixus was discussed.

While NixOS is awesome for configuring one computer. I am quite stumped on how i could leverage Nix to connect several machines together. Currently i am simply using DNS lookups trough a VPN or local-connection and just using my own knowledge where the services would connect between the hosts. Preferably we could stay around using nixos-rebuild --target and not super large tools like nixops.

infinisil commented 9 months ago

I don't think this is entirely fit for a Nix hour, because Nix won't be involved for this other than configuring some runtime services. For example, here's some options that I know of to do this:

Discovery (figuring out which machine to connect to)
- Hardcoded IPs in Nix
- DNS records
- Consul
Connectivity (how to transmit data between the machines)
- Public IP
- Zerotier
- Some other VPN

I hope this helps, let me know!