Docker Was Too Slow, So We Replaced It: Nix in Production

Talk by Aneesh Agrawal https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/22x/presentations/docker-was-too-slow-so-we-replaced-it-nix-production Kubernetes means containers - but container images stop scaling once you hit 25+ GB, even if you’re building them with Nix. Learn how Anthropic took production startup times from minutes to sub-second with a multi-level, replicated cache hierarchy. We’ll deep dive into nix-sidecar: our custom tool to escape Docker, replacing slow image pulls with highly-parallel native Nix fetches, cached on every node. This talk is for anyone interested in faster deploys or advanced Nix usage!