Microgram

Microgram is a project that aims to provide tooling for accomodating end-to-end lifecycle of cloud-native applications.

Microgram uses Nix for expressing deployment topologies and packaging software using the Nix package manager.

Watch this space for updates.

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NixOS

Microgram includes opinionated NixOS 15.09 configuration targeted for deployments in IaaS environments.

Currently supported backends: EC2 AMI (EBS and instance-store), QEMU (automated testing), VirtualBox (works in other providers that support OVAs, like VMWare).

• nixos/ - opinionated base NixOS configuration, used to be a part of Upcast

To test images of Nginx:

You need <nixpkgs> in your $NIX_PATH to build, branch release-15.09. If you don't have a remote builder, substitute upcast build -t builder.example.com with nix-build.

# builds an OVA (exported by VirtualBox)
upcast build -t builder.example.com -A ova tests/nginx.nix

# builds a VDI (to be used with VirtualBox), might be faster as it doesn't have VirtualBox as a dependency
upcast build -t builder.example.com -A vdi tests/nginx.nix

# builds and runs a test in qemu
upcast build -t builder.example.com -A qemu-test tests/nginx.nix

export AWS_ACCOUNT_ID=...
export AWS_X509_CERT=...
export AWS_X509_KEY=...
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY=...
export AWS_SECRET_KEY=...

# bundles an instance-store AMI
upcast build -t builder.example.com -A s3-bundle tests/nginx.nix

# builds a script that sets up an EBS AMI
upcast build -t builder.example.com -A ebs-ami-builder tests/nginx.nix

Packaging software

• to-nix/python - Python packaging documentation and tools (previously known as python2nix)
• to-nix/haskell - Haskell packaging documentation for programs using Cabal
• to-nix/golang - Go packaging documentation for Nix

Utility scripts

• bin/ - Lightweight Nix-related tooling

Additional tooling

Other platform-related projects are:

• Defnix - aims to replace some core NixOS components that were not designed for our use cases and provides a novel interface to supersede NixOS modules. It uses a lot of metaprogramming and nix-exec for running effectful nix builds.
• Upcast - provides AWS infrastructure provisioning (insipired by NixOps but decoupling infrastructure from software) and tooling that extends nix-build.