We’re excited to announce that the Upwind Sensor now officially supports NixOS. This marks a major step forward for teams running fully declarative infrastructure – NixOS users can now seamlessly deploy and manage the Upwind Sensor using the reproducible, version-controlled workflows they already trust for the rest of their system.
What is NixOS?
NixOS is an increasingly popular distribution of Linux that is built around the Nix Package Manager and is known for its secure and deterministic nature. NixOS brings a radically different approach to system management by making everything, from package installations to system services, declarative and reproducible. This means you define your system configuration in a single file, and NixOS ensures your machine matches that exact specification, every time.
For teams managing complex infrastructure, NixOS enables:
- Reliable and reproducible deployments
- Declarative infrastructure management
- Simple and safe rollbacks
- Security and stability by design
NixOS has also seen rapid growth in adoption inside security-focused organizations, especially among infrastructure and platform engineering teams. As a result, the operating system has a rapidly growing, technically strong, and dedicated community surrounding it. Everyone from hobbyists to large-scale infrastructure engineers is helping shape the ecosystem.
Customer-Led Innovation
“Complete trust in a security provider. The solution is designed incredibly well. It’s so innovative. In today’s security landscape, you just don’t see this kind of approach to tackling problems.”
– Kosta Djukic, Principal Engineer – Cloud Infrastructure at Ada, on how he would describe Upwind in one sentence.
NixOS support reflects Upwind’s core product philosophy: we listen closely, build quickly, and ship what matters most to customers.
Enabling support for NixOS is a perfect example of the mutually beneficial relationship between Upwind and our customers. As NixOS adoption grew, teams asked for native Upwind support. Instead of building in isolation, we collaborated with NixOS users from our customers early in the process, gathering insights, testing, and then refining our integration based on real-world use cases. The input from NixOS users helped us prioritize what mattered most: the reliability and ease of deployment of the Upwind Sensor. The result is support shaped not by assumptions, but by the needs of the people using it.
Upwind’s Support for NixOS
Starting today, Upwind natively supports full lifecycle installation of the Upwind Sensor on NixOS via system-level configuration, with support for both x86 and ARM64 architectures. By bringing Upwind’s Sensor to NixOS, we’re offering a powerful layer of protection that aligns perfectly with NixOS’s emphasis on reproducibility, consistency, and immutability. NixOS users can now seamlessly integrate Upwind’s advanced real-time and runtime capabilities. These include baselines, a topology map, and context-based prioritization designed to reduce noise and speed up response, all while preserving the declarative, version-controlled nature of their environments.
Learn More
With Upwind’s new support for NixOS, the Upwind Sensor fits naturally into the declarative, reproducible world that infrastructure and security teams are building toward. One where real-time protection doesn’t mean compromise on security, observability, or operational control.
To learn more about Upwind’s support for NixOS or our roadmap for additional Linux distributions, schedule a call with our team.
