Andreas (Jun 30 2024 at 15:23): Andreas (Jun 30 2024 at 15:23):Srid told mit that you @Shivaraj B H are having some kind of NixOS datacenter project going? Care to tell me more about that?
Shivaraj B H (Jun 30 2024 at 18:41):I have it in mind, yes. But haven’t had the chance to do anything about it unfortunately. I was thinking of providing Hetzner like services here in India. It is especially important considering how expensive AWS, GCP and azure can get and their vendor lock-in strategies (these strategies might be less now, but it does exist). I don’t own racks in any datacenters, but I could either rent a few racks to start with and manage them using NixOS. All this will not matter if I don’t have clients to use this new cloud-service provider in the market. I am hoping a few clients might be ready to use it for their non-critical tasks just because of the lower price. Once the financials add up, could dream bigger and have DCs like Hetzner.
Andreas (Jul 02 2024 at 17:55):Idk if you have seen this, but this project looks interesting: https://github.com/SaumonNet/proxmox-nixos
Not quite there yet for clustering, but once they have that, it might be great.
The only thing that isn't so great is that they put everything under a licence other than MIT and it's not clear if they intend to upstream this at all.
Andreas (Jul 02 2024 at 17:56):but your project does sound enticing I have to say, very interesting
Shivaraj B H (Jul 03 2024 at 08:46):Idk if you have seen this, but this project looks interesting: https://github.com/SaumonNet/proxmox-nixos
Yes, I came across this one. It is interesting.
The only thing that isn't so great is that they put everything under a licence other than MIT
The AGPL-v3 license seems to be because upstream uses that one, I couldn’t find the source but one of the staff member of proxmox mentioned here: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-ve-licensing-features.87788/post-384662
Andreas (Jul 03 2024 at 08:47):Yes but does that make sense? Aren't there many pieces of software already in nixpkgs that use that licence?
Andreas (Jul 03 2024 at 08:53):like that for instance: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-24.05/pkgs/applications/backup/proxmox-backup-client/default.nix#L152
Shivaraj B H (Jul 03 2024 at 08:55):Yes but does that make sense?
It does not, unless you are modifying the code you can have your own license and re-distribute it, while providing the original source code with agpl-v3 license.
Andreas (Jul 03 2024 at 08:57):I think this only makes sense if they don't want to commit it to nixpkgs ... I will go and ask them on discourse what is going on with that.
Andreas (Jul 03 2024 at 08:58):because the project is very nice. Once you have Proxmox clustering support and everything, you could use that as the foundational stone for NixOS-based datacenters.
Andreas (Jul 03 2024 at 08:59):and then you could build a terraform-backend with a nice frontend for the outside to automate VM provisioning via Proxmox in your cluster
Shivaraj B H (Jul 03 2024 at 09:00):Yup, pretty exciting
Andreas (Jul 03 2024 at 09:11):Alright, I asked them
Andreas (Jul 03 2024 at 09:12):but if this was working nicely for proxmox custering out of the box and wouldn't rely on a third party cache as it does right now, it'd be a really nice (and cheap!) basis for building smaller datacenters in order to offer hosting solutions with nice automated provisioning for clients.
Andreas (Jul 03 2024 at 09:16):Idk what the alternatives would be tbh: VMware, Nutanix, maybe something like OpenStack?
Shivaraj B H (Jul 03 2024 at 09:19):https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/s/2eHFsh2NPW
Shivaraj B H (Jul 03 2024 at 09:19):^ recommends xcp-ng
Andreas (Jul 04 2024 at 07:55):yes, I am not sure on the Xen vs. KVM question. I only ever used the latter.
Shivaraj B H (Jul 04 2024 at 07:56):I have also tried only KVM, but I might soon give Xen a shot
John Bargman (Jul 06 2024 at 07:17):I think Proxmox is fantastic for VDS services; but you will most likely want VPS services aswell;
OpenStack works exceptionally for those.
Using Nix as a reliable backbone for a data-center is very exciting! I've got some small-scale tests in my own home, never had enough resources to make a larger system though.
John Bargman (Jul 06 2024 at 07:18):Also, LibVirt/QEMU and/or MicroVM works very very well for stable single-deployments (such as CDN and VPN/networking runners)
Andreas (Jul 06 2024 at 08:13):I can only say I am very happy with Proxmox. If it came built on NixOS it might be even nicer to deploy quicker on new machines. But other than the deployment, there is a fairly capable Terraform-provider for Proxmox out there.
And for larger stuff, yes, OpenStack might be a really nice solution.
Last updated: Nov 15 2024 at 11:45 UTC