Kubernetes on Nix (nixcon2025)

Running a production grade kubernetes cluster is a non trivial task. Although many commercial and non-commercial solutions are available, each comes with its own limitations. Some are primarily meant to set up a single node development cluster, others have hardly any flexibility. Here NixOS comes to the rescue, allowing us to build our cluster the way we want. However, because of the complexity of such a multi host setup, this is a bit more work than a services.kubernetes.enable = true;. We will look into the Kubernetes modules in NixOS, and how we can use them to set up a production grade cluster. For this we will consider what certificates we need, and how we can utilize a secret management solution like agenix to deploy them. We will also analyze how we can utilize Nix and the kubernetes addon-manager to configure our cluster from nix. Being able to install tools like ingress or the cert-manager is the final piece to describe the entire cluster in our nix config. about this event: https://talks.nixcon.org/nixcon-2025/talk/AZF8PR/