Painless Transposition of Reproducible Distributed Environments with NixOS Compose

Development of environments for distributed systems is a tedious and time-consuming iterative process. The reproducibility of such environments is a crucial factor for rigorous scientific contributions. We think that being able to smoothly test environments both locally and on a target dis-tributed platform makes development cycles faster and reduces the friction to adopt better experimental practices. To address this issue, this paper introduces the notion of environment transposition and implements it in NixOS Compose, a tool that generates reproducible distributed environments. It enables users to deploy their environments on virtualized (docker, QEMU) or physical (Grid'5000) platforms with the same unique description of the environment. We show that NixOS Compose enables to build reproducible environments without overhead by comparing it to state-of-the-art solutions for the generation of distributed environments (EnOSlib and Kameleon). NixOS Compose actually enables substantial performance improvements on image building time over Kameleon (up to 11x faster for initial builds and up to 19x faster when building a variation of an existing environment).