I think Pulumi is in a similar spot, you get a real programming language (of your choice) and it gets to use the existing provider ecosystem. You can use the programming language composition facilities to work around the plan system if necessary, although their plans allow more dynamic stuff than Terraform.
The setup with Terranix sounds cool! I am pretty interested in build system type things myself, I recently wrote a plan/apply system too that I use to manage SQL migrations.
I want learn nix, but I think that like Rust, it's just a bit too wide/deep for me to approach on my own time without a tutor/co-worker or forcing function like a work project to push me through the initial barrier.
Yep it's similar, but you bring all your dependencies with you through Nix rather than a language specific package manager.
Try using something like devenv.sh initially just to bring tools into $PATH in a distro agnostic & mostly-ish MacOS compatible way (so you can guarantee everyone has the same versions of EVERYTHING you need to build your thing).
Learn the language basics after it brings you value already, then learn about derivations and then the module system which is this crazy composable multilayer recursive magic merging type system implemented on top of Nix, don't be afraid to clone nixpkgs and look inside.
Nix derivations are essentially Dockerfiles on steroids, but Nix language brings /nix/store paths into the container, sets environment variables for you and runs some scripts, and all these things are hashed so if any input changes it triggers automatic cascading rebuilds, but also means you can use a binary cache as a kind of "memoization" caching thingy which is nice.
It's a very useful tool, it's very non-invasive on your system (other than disk space if you're not managing garbage collection) and you can use it in combination with other tools.
Makes it very easy to guarantee your DevOps scripts runs exactly your versions of all CLI tools and build systems and whatever even if the final piece isn't through Nix.
pgroll seems neat but I ended up writing my own tools for this one because I need to do somewhat unique shenanigans like testing different sharding and resource allocation schemes in Materialize.com (self hosted). I have 480 source input schemas (postgres input schemas described here if you're curious, the materialize stuff is brand new https://www.notion.com/blog/the-great-re-shard) and manage a bunch of different views & indexes built on top of those; create a bunch of different copies of the views/indexes striped across compute nodes, like right now I'm testing 20 schemas per whole-aws-instance node, versus 4 schemas per quarter-aws-node, M/N*Y with different permutations of N and Y. With the plan/apply model I just need to change a few lines in TypeScript and get the minimal changes to all downstream dependencies needed to roll it out.
The setup with Terranix sounds cool! I am pretty interested in build system type things myself, I recently wrote a plan/apply system too that I use to manage SQL migrations.
I want learn nix, but I think that like Rust, it's just a bit too wide/deep for me to approach on my own time without a tutor/co-worker or forcing function like a work project to push me through the initial barrier.