Roman Volosatovs

In this talk I will tell a success story of how I managed to drive Nix adoption at Profian starting with reproducible release binary builds, to project CI and all the way to using NixOS in production. I will discuss the benefits gained from the company-wide Nix adoption, share the approach used for achieving this, my strategy for introducing colleagues to Nix, lessons learnt, pitfalls and hurdles encountered, as well as problems identified in the process.

Deploying to "the cloud" is incredibly convenient, but that convenience normally comes at a cost. The host necessarily becomes a major part of the applications trust domain, and a compromised host means a compromised application or a network of thereof. This prevents several highly-regulated sectors, such as medical or financial, from directly deploying to "the cloud" as opposed to building their own infrastructure. Solutions to this problem exist, but most require a custom and correct implementation tied to a particular hardware vendor and SDK. I will present a hardware-agnostic and cloud provider-agnostic solution to this issue, which, with minimal changes to the implementation, can be used to secure a network of applications and demonstrate strong trust assertions produced by doing so.