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Comment by flurie | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on the product reveal! It's exciting to see all these things getting announced right around NixCon, and I wish I could have made it.

I'm having trouble seeing the audience for this product. If I'm in an org going for SOC 2, it's likely I already have a story around artifact access that isn't intrinsically tied with my build system. If I weren't already building sensitive things with Nix, this doesn't seem like the thing that would get me to switch. If I have a monorepo, flakes are likely off the table right away due to the performance hit. Am I missing something about how people are using flakes right now?

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> Am I missing something about how people are using flakes right now?

Yes. Lots of orgs are using Nix today and need to meet SOC2 or better, and are using many different caches to meet compliance objectives. This is creating a significant performance penalty.

Further, whether you care about the separation or not the onboarding process is simply nicer, because it is tied to the environment you're running in (GHA) not tokens you have to copy paste around.

> If I have a monorepo, flakes are likely off the table right away due to the performance hit.

If you've heard of "lazy trees", that work is being spearheaded by us at DetSys to address this problem :).

Thanks for the response, Graham.

I think I'm still missing something. By all accounts, I and my organization should be in your target market, but there are a few barriers:

- I've achieved significant adoption of Nix for a great many things, but not for building proprietary software.

- I already have an enterprise-grade artifact store to use as a cache.

- I also have an identity platform and robust secrets management.

- I have evaluated lazy trees Nix at a few different intervals and did not find it enough of a speedup to continue using it.

The sum total of all of these barriers is that I may be wrong about whether we're truly in your target market, but I also think those will be common barriers for you, which makes me think I still don't quite understand the product or the market correctly.

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