I think maybe I've mis-communicated somewhere along the way. I'm not saying containers are a bad idea; they're a good deployment strategy for many use cases. What I'm saying is that there are a lot of slapped together tools out there trying to provide a declarative/atomic infrastructure that are doing it poorly...but, are quite popular. NixOS seems like an ideal tool for the task; as you note, one could readily build your containers with NixOS (and I think it'd be the ideal choice for that). And, in fact, that's primarily what I was thinking of.
We've been working on Docker support in our products lately, so it's on my mind, and the way that so many lessons that have been learned in the past couple decades of systems management are kinda thrown overboard in the Docker (and other containers) community. As above where there's a sort of belief that "containers" makes the problems package management solves irrelevant. Likewise, there's a lot of throwing security out the window; a tremendous level of trust is being given to container builders.
I could rant all day about stuff like this, and there's always the risk of turning into Grandpa Simpson. So, I'll stop ranting after a summary:
Containers are cool, but a lot of people are making a lot of mistakes in their use of containers. NixOS is cool, and might remedy some of the problems I see in the way people are using containers (while also solving a number of other problems of reliable deployments, not just with containers).
We've been working on Docker support in our products lately, so it's on my mind, and the way that so many lessons that have been learned in the past couple decades of systems management are kinda thrown overboard in the Docker (and other containers) community. As above where there's a sort of belief that "containers" makes the problems package management solves irrelevant. Likewise, there's a lot of throwing security out the window; a tremendous level of trust is being given to container builders.
I could rant all day about stuff like this, and there's always the risk of turning into Grandpa Simpson. So, I'll stop ranting after a summary:
Containers are cool, but a lot of people are making a lot of mistakes in their use of containers. NixOS is cool, and might remedy some of the problems I see in the way people are using containers (while also solving a number of other problems of reliable deployments, not just with containers).