NixOS (or Guix) seems like an ideal platform for building service-based architectures. I don't understand why it's not more popular. CoreOS seems to be extremely popular in that space, despite working against a somewhat crappy package manager (portage from Gentoo) and with all of the declarative stuff slapped on top in a quite heavy-handed way. With CoreOS, you roll entirely new images whenever you have a change to deploy. So, the goals are the same, but the mechanisms are so very different as to make them look like they're solving different problems. I'm pretty sure I prefer the way NixOS is going about it.
That said, I've not used either in production. But, Nix was the first time I've looked at a new package manager and thought, "OK, someone finally improved on RPM/yum or deb/apt." Most of the time, I look at new package managers and just find myself running down a list of all of the ways they've failed to even replicate the power/flexibility/reliability of those now-ancient package managers, and usually without any really good reason. It's a cool side effect of a superior package manager that so much other stuff comes easily or automatically.
Anyway, this is a really cool idea, and something I want to look into more. You get so much of the "declarative and predictable" elements you want in a service-based architecture for free with Nix, while so many other solutions are bolted on clumsily.
That said, I've not used either in production. But, Nix was the first time I've looked at a new package manager and thought, "OK, someone finally improved on RPM/yum or deb/apt." Most of the time, I look at new package managers and just find myself running down a list of all of the ways they've failed to even replicate the power/flexibility/reliability of those now-ancient package managers, and usually without any really good reason. It's a cool side effect of a superior package manager that so much other stuff comes easily or automatically.
Anyway, this is a really cool idea, and something I want to look into more. You get so much of the "declarative and predictable" elements you want in a service-based architecture for free with Nix, while so many other solutions are bolted on clumsily.