Flexibility with the Nitric Framework
Freedom of choice
In this section, we will discuss how you can move away from using the Nitric Framework. The Nitric team would love for you to continue using the framework, but only if it serves you.
Our philosophy has always been freedom, choose your cloud, choose your language and use your preferred dev tools. To achieve this goal we've had to be opinionated about our technology decisions and realize that sometimes it might not fit your needs.
Open-source
The Nitric framework is open-source and leverages other great open source technologies like Pulumi and Terraform. This means that you will always have full visibility over whats going on in the framework at both build and runtime.
If a feature is missing, the first step is to get in touch:
A great time to contact us is when your team requires support for a native resource which we do not yet support or you need to extend the default configuration of an existing resource.
A Nitric team member can help you build a provider with the IaC tool of choice to satisfy your requirements and add more value to the greater community.
Choosing a new IaC
Most of the code that you write for your applications will likely be specific to your organization or domain. Nitric's role is to provide supporting runtime and deploy time resources which make it easier for you to build your app. We have eliminated the need for a separate deployment project, so this will be where the most effort lies in migrating away.
Deciding which IaC tool will suit your needs is a difficult decision, and one which we've attempted to abstract and automate to free up your time. We're pro code over config, so our recommendation would be to use an IaC tool like Pulumi - but the choice is yours.
Our framework and CLI are written in Go, and use the Pulumi Go Providers, so you may be able to avoid rewriting all of the provisioning code by lifting the provisioning code which we've already built.
CI Pipelines
If you have used the CLI in your pipelines, then you will need to rebuild your CI pipelines to leverage the new IaC tooling that you have chosen.
If you decided to use Nitric Deploy over the CLI, then you will have to create your own CI pipelines to implement this component of your deployment. Nitric Deploy watches your pipeline for commits, and automatically triggers the infrastructure provisioning.
Data Migration
The Nitric Framework does not have access to your data - db, storage, or otherwise. These are all deployed to your cloud instances.
If you're using Nitric Deploy, we recommend removing the credentials which allow us to deploy to your account on your behalf.
Get in Contact
The team is always interested in receiving your feedback, don't hesitate to contact us if you are contemplating moving or have moved away. We are actively building new features, and your feedback will help shape our roadmap to support you and future users of the framework.
In a recent exchange we learned of a requirement to work with tools which analyze Terraform. As a result, we've built prototype providers to eject Terraform from Nitric applications.