Have you ever experienced being rate limited by GitHub? Has GitHub downtime prevented you from building software that you rely on? Are you worried about supply chain attacks? At Exa, we developed a secure, hostable, tarball cache that insulates us from GitHub outages, decreases our build times, protects us from force-pushes upstream, and increases download speeds.

One of the hardest problems with Infrastructure as Code tooling is modeling and managing complex relationships. This problem only becomes harder when multiple different tools are introduced, each lacking observability into the other. Then add build systems, application logic, deployments, CI/CD, and it becomes unbearably messy with footguns and CVEs around every corner.

At Exa, we take Nix far beyond building packages or development shells. Our entire infrastructure is modeled with Nix as one large DAG that allows us to manage these dependencies and orchestrate deployments across project boundaries with confidence in the process and its security. Join to learn more about Exa's introduction to Nix, how our usage has changed over time, how we think about flakes, and the lessons we've learned to build the future of search.