libaws VS nixpkgs

i print the error along with file and line number every time i return it. clunky, but it works.

in fact i print file and line with every log message.

https://github.com/nathants/libaws/blob/87fb45b4cae20abd1bb1...

cloud is so good now it’s hard to justify not doing something bespoke. ec2 spot is insanely cheaper than turnkey cicd, and better in almost every way.

i’m delighted to pay 30% over infra cost for convenience, but not 500%. and it better actually be convenient, not just have a good landing page and sales team.

this month i learned localzones have even better spot prices. losangeles-1 is half the spot price of us-west-2.

for a runner, do something like this, but react to an http call instead of a s3 put[1].

for a web ui do something like this[2].

s3, lambda, and ec2 spot are a perfect fit for cicd and a lot more.

1. https://github.com/nathants/libaws/tree/91b1c27fc947e067ed46...

2. https://github.com/nathants/aws-exec/tree/e68769126b5aae0e35...

like linux, cloud is a lot to learn, but worth it.

like linux, cloud is best kept simple, or it can become brittle and confusing.

like linux, cloud has a lot of cool things like zfs, that should be appreciated but rarely used.

like linux, using go makes your life a lot easier. the aws go sdk is the documentation.

like linux, you have to learn a lot and then find the core utility you actually care about. for me it is:

https://github.com/nathants/libaws

the good new is, for the 95% of projects that can tolerate it, aws the good parts are actually both simple and easy[1].

it’s hard to find things you can’t build on s3, dynamo, lambda, and ec2.

if either compliance or a 5% project demand it, complicated solutions should be explored.

1. https://github.com/nathants/libaws

i also wanted a good cli for aws, and built one:

https://github.com/nathants/libaws

companies like fly are fantastic.

they provide a good service, and they put market pressure on aws.

cool transition and fun writeup!

for low, intermittent traffic sites, go on lambda might be a better comparison:

https://github.com/nathants/libaws/tree/master/examples/simp...

lambda + s3. add ec2 spot if you need it.

just make sure you understand how billing works. mostly it’s just egress bandwidth is expensive.

do something like this:

https://github.com/nathants/aws-gocljs

or with less opinions:

https://github.com/nathants/libaws/tree/master/examples/simp...

welcome to cloud, glhf!

aws ux for retaining both hair and sanity.

https://github.com/nathants/libaws

build and scale systems with artificial load on aws! scaling the load testing will be just as interesting as scaling the system under test.

start with low bottlenecks, ie a cluster of c6i.large ec2 spot. how fast can you do this? have fast can you scale that? ec2 and s3 is all you need to build anything.

use ec2 spot, avoid network egress, avoid cross region/zone traffic, create and destroy ec2 instances as needed instead of letting them sit idle. you could grow system scaling intution for the price of your streaming subscriptions.

start with something like this:

https://github.com/nathants/libaws/tree/master/examples/comp...

maybe mess around with public datasets on aws, just make sure to be in the correct region to avoid data egress.

welcome systems friend. one accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions. scaling is fun!

aws has too many knobs, presumably to satisfy the union of the needs of all the enterprise customers. that said, lambda+s3+dynamodb+ec2 are pretty good once you tape over all the knobs that aren't needed. i work with them like this[1].

these days i build on aws and r2. aws for the nuts and bolts, r2 for high bandwidth egress. it's a perfect match.

1. https://github.com/nathants/libaws

I see two signers in the top 6 displayed on https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/graphs/contributors

For a single file script, nix can make the package management quite easy: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/doc/languages-f...

For example,

```

Yes, Nix doesn't actually ensure that the builds are deterministic. In fact it works just fine if they aren't. There are packages in nixpkgs that aren't reproducible: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aiss...

I'm not familiar with Bazel, but Nix in it's current form wouldn't have solved this attack. First of all, the standard mkDerivation function calls the same configure; make; make install process that made this attack possible. Nixpkgs regularly pulls in external resources (fetchUrl and friends) that are equally vulnerable to a poisoned release tarball. Checkout the comment on the current xz entry in nixpkgs https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/tools/comp...

NixOS uses a monorepo and I think everyone's love it.

I love being able to easily grep through all the packages source code and there's regularly PRs that harmonizes conventions across many packages.

Nixpkgs doesn't include the packaged software source code, so it's a lot more practical than what Debian is doing.

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs

In this specific case, nix uses fetchFromGitHub to download the source archive, which are generated by GitHub for the specified revision[1]. Arch seems to just download the tarball from the releases page[2].

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/3c2fdd0a4e6396fc310a6e...

[2]: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/ib...

True, but irrelevant -- _some packages_, _somewhere_, do depend on xz, which, if built, requires pulling the source from GitHub (see the default.nix: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-23.11/pkgs/tools...)

It's not the vulnerability that's a problem right now (NixOS was protected by a couple of factors) but rather GitHub's hamfisted response.

That is the problem.

We’ve noticed that some users have been asking about how to use older versions of Terraform in their Nix setups [1, 2]. This is an example of the diverse needs of people and the importance of maintaining backward compatibility. We hope that nixpkgs-terraform will be a useful tool for these users.

I think whateveracct was referring to is this link:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/developmen...

What that file is doing, is building a package, and it essentially is a combination of what Makefile and what RPM spec file does.

I don't know if you're familiar with those tools, but if you aren't it takes some time to know them enough to understand what is happening. So why would be different here?