devbox VS containerd

How does Flox compare to Devbox? https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

I've spent the last year managing all my packages with Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox).

Local dev, cloud dev, CI, production – all with the same config file. Fingers crossed my talk submission for PackagingCon gets accepted. It'd be awesome to share this new way of working with a wider audience.

> Now to figure out what a "flake" is…

Flake is a worthwhile addition to Nix that is worth learning. But like anything Nixian, it's not straightforward.

Have you checked out any of the tools that aim to simplify Nix experience? We built Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox) with this in mind.

Also devbox ( https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox ) which is what this is for does not work on windows because of its Nix dependency.

For these reasons, I believe most developer environments should prioritize developer experience over fidelity. Tools like Containerized development environments and cloud emulators can strike the right balance and there’s no surprise that we see increased activity around devcontainers, and similar solutions.

Local first, cloud optional is the only way (IMHO) we're going to get people off their local laptop development setups.

We need to support local dev environments first, with the exact same config a developer can then move to the cloud.

See https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox for how this can be achieved and https://www.mikenikles.com/blog/dev-environments-in-the-clou... for my thoughts after 3 years of working in this space.

If you like the properties of Nix, but find it confusing, you should check out Devbox! It simplifies the process of creating Nix-powered dev environments:

https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

As part of the work we've been doing with [devbox](https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox), we needed a unit testing framework to test some of our nix code. Unfortunately we had some use cases where we did *not* want to introduce a dependency on `nixpkgs` (and therefore we couldn't use `runTests`).

You might be interested in Devbox (http://jetpack.io/devbox)! We built Devbox because we were frustrated with our Docker based dev environments, and our goal is to provide the power of Nix with a more accessible interface (similar to yarn or other package managers).

We're open source and rapidly adding features, you can check us out on Github at https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

Containerd and nerdctl

Kubernetes on the backend used to utilize docker for much of its container runtime solutions. One of the modular features of Kubernetes is the ability to utilize a Container Runtime Interface or CRI. The problem was that Docker didn't really meet the spec properly and they had to maintain a shim to translate properly. Instead users could utilize the popular containerd or cri-o runtimes. These follow the Open Container Initiative or OCI's guidelines on container formats.

Container Engine: A runtime that executes and manages containers. Docker and containerd are popular container engines.

Multiple container runtimes are supported, like conatinerd, cri-o, or other CRI compliant runtimes.

This is a failed attempt to upstream part of containerd changes: https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/8789

Other part of containerd changes waits for gods-know-what: https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/9054

But I haven't gave up yet.

containerd is required by kubernetes to handle containers on its behalf. A big thanks to the HostAfrica blog for the information on setting containerd up for debain. So the containerd install will need to happen on both the WSL2 instance and the Raspberry Pis. For WSL2 you can just install containerd directly:

The context deadline exceeded: unknown is also in containerd, and is a known problem.

Get:1 https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu focal/stable amd64 containerd.io amd64 1.6.21-1 [28.3 MB]

Docker Desktop adds a bunch of stuff to simplify local development and that’s why it has a larger memory footprint. You don’t use that when deploying but something like https://containerd.io/.