NixCon 2020: Online Edition

Host a DevOps exam using NixOS
10-17, 13:20–13:25 (UTC), Main Stream

We will explore how to host a DevOps exam consisting in deploying a Bastion host and a KVM virtual machine per student in order for them to deploy a website which will be auto-validated.


DevOps students have to test their skills in a real-world exam, what's better than scripting this using NixOps in order to reuse it ?

They will be provided with their own user account on the Bastion and access to a jump user account, WireGuard will be autoconfigured on the host to enable access to their KVM host directly.

The main point is controlling the KVM guests "declaratively" and giving choice to the students to choose their guest OS: Debian or NixOS.

We will see how we can easily generate Nix expression from a scripting language, e.g. Python and feed it to NixOS.

FOSS developer for more than five years, (eternal?) student in mathematics and computer science, interested into formal methods applied to computer security, networks and more.

I enjoy playing around with infrastructure and run my own micro-datacenter in order to understand how can we develop an (economic viable?) model of an NixOS-only and IPv6-only datacenter as much as possible.

And then, someday, I will write a formal proof that the Nix core is sound. But that will be for another day.

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