Developing as a Team for Kubernetes with Nix and Flox

Nix can be daunting to learn!
There are so many ways to hold it -- what can we do as software teams to weild it and become productive in our container environments?

In this workshop, Leigh, Tanja, and Nick will show a Nix GitOps workflow for both your team's laptops and Kubernetes clusters.

We'll cover the basics of Nix and teach about Flox, a collaborative and approachable interface for using Nix as a team.

The development workflows made possible by Nix and the ops workflows pioneered by both Nix and GitOps on Kubernetes extend the story of repeatability further left than ever before.

Attendees will work together in the hands-on portion to:

- bootstrap a frontend and backend project with Javascript, Go, and Postgres

- declare cross-platform tools and dependencies for build and development

- containerize their build in a Nix-native way

- use GitOps via Flux (not Flox) to promote their service to Kubernetes clusters with zero-downtime deploys

Shifting packaging discipline to the left in our team workflows and making it collaborative and cross-platform opens up new maintenance possibilities.

We'll close the session discussing:

- Continuous Builds

- Patching

- Reproducibility and Caching

Teams can save hours of debugging each sprint just by declaring their local dependencies with Nix within the same lifecycle as their code.
This has a notable symmetry to the benefits of GitOps in cloud-native operations.

Expect to leave this workshop with the confidence to harmonize Nix with Kubernetes and change the way you (and your teams) work.