Touching Down on PlanetNix for Community Exploration

PlanetNix 2026 was held in Pasadena, CA, March 5-6 as a co-located event inside SCaLE x23. The PlanetNix community is really a collection of deep Linux aficionados who have built—or are currently building—support systems around a very robust package management system called Nix. There is something to learn for every incoming curiosity around this topic.

My role at NetActuate is to help customers onboard, plan infrastructure, or just facilitate their needs as it relates to our network, platform, or global routing. The infrastructure that lives on the edge is generally single use focused servers aggregating or receiving data to serve and deliver to the local end-user no matter the region. 

Because of these singular focused systems, I feel that NixOS has a secure place in production systems that promote both infrastructure consistency and convergence to a common reliable language and deployment system. In fact, I found Nix to be an ideal solution for a cloud-native deployment model that treats edge nodes as declarative, reproducible systems while preserving the flexibility required for real-world networking and hardware constraints. It uses cloud-init to inject secrets, metadata, and environment-specific parameters; a startup shell script to generate a NixOS configuration; and a nixos-rebuild to transition the system into a fully persistent, self-managed state.

This was the focus of the talk I delivered at PlanetNix: “Eureka! NixOS solves major pain point for Global Edge Deployments”. Get the slides here.

I was warmly welcomed in Pasadena by the Nix Foundation & Flox community: the major driving force behind Nix.  

I was given focused and attentive time with Nix Foundation leaders who were very curious how Nix was being used across the different platforms, and there was an earnestness in the air to promote the use of Nix. Everyone made time to listen, understand, and teach each other. PlanetNix adds back the tinkering teenage mindset to Linux that I first discovered as I moved from Windows to the Slackware terminal, and started to learn how the kernel and the hardware work together to serve the operating system and window managers.  

Believe it or not, there are similarities to today’s Linux atmosphere and Windows of the late 90s. It's all abstracted and easily presented to the end user, making it easier to work with and consume. However, this ultimately denies the end-user of the deeper knowledge of how the kernel and network cards interrelate. It takes focused effort and collaboration to help fill the gaps.   

Moving into NixOS today feels a little like moving to Linux did in the early days... a bit overwhelming and foreign. But the PlanetNix conference and community make that learning experience warm and welcome; and quite honestly, a lot of fun.

After all the introductions and hearing all of the ideas coming out of this community, I am very excited to dive deeper into the NetActuate offerings, and how NixOS and Nix in general can be easier to use, and quicker to build. We've got NixOS deployable as a custom installer on our platform, and we are soon to share examples of how to get NixOS deployed via KVM and cloud-init, having it persist the network configuration and secrets, and then claim that NixOS system for different services or infrastructure needs.

I cannot say enough how wonderful and kind the community is surrounding Nix, and I strongly suggest you reach out to any of us in the community for example use cases and configurations, and any questions you may have.

I truly feel that in this world of abstract, distributed systems, Nix the package manager can provide something truly robust and accountable. Our open source dependencies are rapidly changing in the face of AI, and I find myself reaching out to Nix and the OS for a bit of comfort and consistency. I'll see you at the next one.

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