Florian Pester, Niklas Hilgarth · 3 min read
Introducing Long-Term Support for NixOS: 5 Years of Stability and Security for Critical Systems
Explore our latest initiative: Long-Term Support for NixOS. We're offering 5 years of stability, security updates, and guaranteed backports, making it easier to maintain critical systems without frequent upgrades. Perfect for industries like IoT, medical devices, and more. Learn how it works!
NixOS is Essential for Reliable, Reproducible IT Infrastructure
Dealing with complex IT infrastructure can be a real headache, especially when things work differently across environments. But since we started using Nix and NixOS about 6 years ago, we’ve found that their reproducible builds and declarative configuration solve that problem for us. That’s why both technologies have become such a core part of our workflow - in short: “If it works on my machine, it will work on your’s.”
The declarative nature of NixOS and its powerful module system make it possible to create flexible systems quickly and test them in an incredible efficient fashion. It’s easier to audit such systems and verify that the declared state is indeed correct.
Reproducible builds make it possible to support software for decades, which is important for many of our customers, who are building IT systems that interface with real-world infrastructure. NixOS’ reliability is another great plus for us.
Why NixOS Needs Long-Term Support for Critical Infrastructure
NixOS is moving incredibly fast, with an unstable channel and two stable releases per year. The issue that arises from that is that there is no long-term stable option, because once a new release is out you only have one month to switch from the last release to the current. This is problematic for systems, which are regulated or certified.
Imagine building a medical device for worldwide markets on top of NixOS. These devices need to be certified and nobody will do that twice a year and certainly not within a month. There are many other use-cases for systems which benefit from stability more than from always running after the latest and greatest features. Industrial Control Systems, Traffic Control Systems, many embedded devices and IOT devices all perform a set of functions that remains fairly stable over the lifetime of the system. There is not much economic sense in upgrading these types of systems twice a year.
Our Commitment to NixOS: Ongoing Contributions and Support
Our team consists of many long-term upstream contributors to nixpkgs, the repository that forms the basis for NixOS. Our contributions include improved secure boot support, maintainers for many packages and countless little fixes. We plan to use our expertise and continue to help build a great upstream NixOS.
How NixOS Long-Term Support Will Work: Easy Migration and 5-Year Stability
Further we will offer 5 years of support for each long-term support release to our paying customers, starting with 24.05. We will offer a new LTS release every 2 years, where each release comes with 5 years of guaranteed backports and bug fixes. Since we cannot provide full support for all 100k packages currently available in nixpkgs, we are looking for early customer’s input to help define what packages would benefit most from long-term support.
Switching from the upstream “stable” NixOS channel will be easy: Point your channel and binary cache to our servers, rebuild and that’s it! With a single command, your system will have access to five years of stability, security backports and guaranteed support.
Join Our NixOS 24.05 Long-Term Support Beta Program
In order to ramp things up and get all the details right, we are currently in closed beta. Our early customers will get extra support and a discount on the first year. Upstream support for NixOS 24.05 ends in a few weeks, if you need stable long-term support for NixOS 24.05, sign up for the beta now or contact us via our contact form.
We will also visit NixCon later this month. Let’s have a chat, if you are there as well: We’re happy to set up a dedicated time to meet during NixCon. Let’s connect!