feat(web/blog): Add Nixery layering design as a blog post r/676

Marked as a draft until I've verified that this looks good.

6 files changed, 279 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/web/blog/posts.nix b/web/blog/posts.nix
index d7949fa341..8934cda863 100644
--- a/web/blog/posts.nix
+++ b/web/blog/posts.nix
@@ -14,6 +14,13 @@
     content = ./posts/best-tools.md;
   }
   {
+    key = "nixery-layers";
+    title = "Nixery: Improved Layering Design";
+    date = 1565391600;
+    content = ./posts/nixery-layers.md;
+    draft = true;
+  }
+  {
     key = "reversing-watchguard-vpn";
     title = "Reverse-engineering WatchGuard Mobile VPN";
     date = 1486830338;
diff --git a/web/blog/posts/nixery-layers.md b/web/blog/posts/nixery-layers.md
new file mode 100644
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@@ -0,0 +1,272 @@
+TIP: This blog post was originally published as a design document for
+[Nixery][] and is not written in the same style
+as other blog posts.
+
+Thanks to my colleagues at Google and various people from the Nix community for
+reviewing this.
+
+------
+
+# Nixery: Improved Layering
+
+**Authors**: tazjin@
+
+**Reviewers**: so...@, en...@, pe...@
+
+**Status**: Implemented
+
+**Last Updated**: 2019-08-10
+
+## Introduction
+
+This document describes a design for an improved image layering method for use
+in Nixery. The algorithm [currently used][grhmc] is designed for a slightly
+different use-case and we can improve upon it by making use of more of the
+available data.
+
+## Background / Motivation
+
+Nixery is a service that uses the [Nix package manager][nix] to build container
+images (for runtimes such as Docker), that are served on-demand via the
+container [registry protocols][]. A demo instance is available at
+[nixery.dev][].
+
+In practice this means users can simply issue a command such as `docker pull
+nixery.dev/shell/git` and receive an image that was built ad-hoc containing a
+shell environment and git.
+
+One of the major advantages of building container images via Nix (as described
+for `buildLayeredImage` in [this blog post][grhmc]) is that the
+content-addressable nature of container image layers can be used to provide more
+efficient caching characteristics (caching based on layer content) than what is
+common with Dockerfiles and other image creation methods (caching based on layer
+creation method).
+
+However, this is constrained by the maximum number of layers supported in an
+image (125). A naive approach such as putting each included package (any
+library, binary, etc.) in its own layer quickly runs into this limitation due to
+the large number of dependencies more complex systems tend to have. In addition,
+users wanting to extend images created by Nixery (e.g. via `FROM nixery.dev/…`)
+share this layer maximum with the created image - limiting extensibility if all
+layers are used up by Nixery.
+
+In theory the layering strategy of `buildLayeredImage` should already provide
+good caching characteristics, but in practice we are seeing many images with
+significantly more packages than the number of layers configured, leading to
+more frequent cache-misses than desired.
+
+The current implementation of `buildLayeredImage` inspects a graph of image
+dependencies and determines the total number of references (direct & indirect)
+to any node in the graph. It then sorts all dependencies by this popularity
+metric and puts the first `n - 2` (for `n` being the maximum number of layers)
+packages in their own layers, all remaining packages in one layer and the image
+configuration in the final layer.
+
+## Design / Proposal
+
+## (Close-to) ideal layer-layout using more data
+
+We start out by considering what a close to ideal layout of layers would look
+like for a simple use-case.
+
+![Ideal layout](/static/img/nixery/ideal_layout.webp)
+
+In this example, counting the total number of references to each node in the
+graph yields the following result:
+
+| pkg   | refs |
+|-------|------|
+| E     | 3    |
+| D     | 2    |
+| F     | 2    |
+| A,B,C | 1    |
+
+Assuming we are constrained to 4 layers, the current algorithm would yield these layers:
+
+```
+L1: E
+L2: D
+L3: F
+L4: A, B, C
+```
+
+The initial proposal for this design is that additional data should be
+considered in addition to the total number of references, in particular a
+distinction should be made between direct and indirect references. Packages that
+are only referenced indirectly should be merged with their parents.
+
+This yields the following table:
+
+| pkg   | direct | indirect |
+|-------|--------|----------|
+| E     | 3      | 3        |
+| D     | 2      | 2        |
+| F     | *1*    | 2        |
+| A,B,C | 1      | 1        |
+
+Despite having two indirect references, F is in fact only being referred to
+once. Assuming that we have no other data available outside of this graph, we
+have no reason to assume that F has any popularity outside of the scope of D.
+This might yield the following layers:
+
+```
+L1: E
+L2: D, F
+L3: A
+L4: B, C
+```
+
+D and F were grouped, while the top-level references (i.e. the packages
+explicitly requested by the user) were split up.
+
+An assumption is introduced here to justify this split: The top-level packages
+is what the user is modifying directly, and those groupings are likely
+unpredictable. Thus it is opportune to not group top-level packages in the same
+layer.
+
+This raises a new question: Can we make better decisions about where to split
+the top-level?
+
+## (Even closer to) ideal layering using (even) more data
+
+So far when deciding layer layouts, only information immediately available in
+the build graph of the image has been considered. We do however have much more
+information available, as we have both the entire nixpkgs-tree and potentially
+other information (such as download statistics).
+
+We can calculate the total number of references to any derivation in nixpkgs and
+use that to rank the popularity of each package. Packages within some percentile
+can then be singled out as good candidates for a separate layer.
+
+When faced with a splitting decision such as in the last section, this data can
+aid the decision. Assume for example that package B in the above is actually
+`openssl`, which is a very popular package. Taking this into account would
+instead yield the following layers:
+
+```
+L1: E,
+L2: D, F
+L3: B,
+L4: A, C
+```
+
+## Layer budgets and download size considerations
+
+As described in the introduction, there is a finite amount of layers available
+for each image (the “layer budget”). When calculating the layer distribution, we
+might end up with the “ideal” list of layers that we would like to create. Using
+our previous example:
+
+```
+L1: E,
+L2: D, F
+L3: A
+L4: B
+L5: C
+```
+
+If we only have a layer budget of 4 available, something needs to be merged into
+the same layer. To make a decision here we could consider only the package
+popularity, but there is in fact another piece of information that has not come
+up yet: The actual size of the package.
+
+Presumably a user would not mind downloading a library that is a few kilobytes
+in size repeatedly, but they would if it was a 200 megabyte binary instead.
+
+Conversely if a large binary was successfully cached, but an extremely popular
+small library is not, the total download size might also grow to irritating
+levels.
+
+To avoid this we can calculate a merge rating:
+
+    merge_rating(pkg) = popularity_percentile(pkg) × size(pkg.subtree)
+
+Packages with a low merge rating would be merged together before packages with
+higher merge ratings.
+
+## Implementation
+
+There are two primary components of the implementation:
+
+1. The layering component which, given an image specification, decides the image
+   layers.
+
+2. The popularity component which, given the entire nixpkgs-tree, calculates the
+   popularity of packages.
+
+## Layering component
+
+It turns out that graph theory’s concept of [dominator trees][] maps reasonably
+well onto the proposed idea of separating direct and indirect dependencies. This
+becomes visible when creating the dominator tree of a simple example:
+
+![Example without extra edges](/static/img/nixery/example_plain.webp)
+
+Before calculating the dominator tree, we inspect each node and insert extra
+edges from the root for packages that match a certain popularity or size
+threshold. In this example, G is popular and an extra edge is inserted:
+
+![Example with extra edges](/static/img/nixery/example_extra.webp)
+
+Calculating the dominator tree of this graph now yields our ideal layer
+distribution:
+
+![Dominator tree of example](/static/img/nixery/dominator.webp)
+
+The nodes immediately dominated by the root node can now be “harvested” as image
+layers, and merging can be performed as described above until the result fits
+into the layer budget.
+
+To implement this, the layering component uses the [gonum/graph][] library which
+supports calculating dominator trees. The program is fed with Nix’s
+`exportReferencesGraph` (which contains the runtime dependency graph and runtime
+closure size) as well as the popularity data and layer budget. It returns a list
+of layers, each specifying the paths it should contain.
+
+Nix invokes this program and uses the output to create a derivation for each
+layer, which is then built and returned to Nixery as usual.
+
+TIP: This is implemented in [`layers.go`][layers.go] in Nixery. The file starts
+with an explanatory comment that talks through the process in detail.
+
+## Popularity component
+
+The primary issue in calculating the popularity of each package in the tree is
+that we are interested in the runtime dependencies of a derivation, not its
+build dependencies.
+
+To access information about the runtime dependency, the derivation actually
+needs to be built by Nix - it can not be inferred because Nix does not know
+which store paths will still be referenced by the build output.
+
+However for packages that are cached in the NixOS cache, we can simply inspect
+the `narinfo`-files and use those to determine popularity.
+
+Not every package in nixpkgs is cached, but we can expect all *popular* packages
+to be cached. Relying on the cache should therefore be reasonable and avoids us
+having to rebuild/download all packages.
+
+The implementation will read the `narinfo` for each store path in the cache at a
+given commit and create a JSON-file containing the total reference count per
+package.
+
+For the public Nixery instance, these popularity files will be distributed via a
+GCS bucket.
+
+TIP: This is implemented in [popcount][] in Nixery.
+
+--------
+
+Hopefully this detailed design review was useful to you. You can also watch [my
+NixCon talk][talk] about Nixery for a review of some of this, and some demos.
+
+[Nixery]: https://github.com/google/nixery
+[grhmc]: https://grahamc.com/blog/nix-and-layered-docker-images
+[Nix]: https://nixos.org/nix
+[registry protocols]: https://github.com/opencontainers/distribution-spec/blob/master/spec.md
+[nixery.dev]: https://nixery.dev
+[dominator trees]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominator_(graph_theory)
+[gonum/graph]: https://godoc.org/gonum.org/v1/gonum/graph
+[layers.go]: https://github.com/google/nixery/blob/master/builder/layers.go
+[popcount]: https://github.com/google/nixery/tree/master/popcount
+[talk]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOI9H4oeXqA
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