Remote Nix Builds

Nix has builtin support for distributing builds to remote machines. In fact, any SSH-accessible computer with a Nix installation can be used as a build server! In this talk, I'll give an overview on how remote Nix builds work in practice, and talk about their possibilities and limitations. I'll also lift the lid on Nix and show how the remote builder protocol works. Finally I'll mention some improvements I'd like to see in Nix, based on my experience on implementing the nixbuild.net service.