> If you want the dev team to have a strong dependency on the devops team for every little (often unpredictable) aspect of their workflow,

I have never used nix, but from the article the author only concentrated on the fact that docker and nix create reproducible environments, and completely misses the other benefits of containers.

As a devops guy if someone hands me a nix project, how do I deploy that so it is highly available and scales by itself?

With containers I just put it in kubernetes.

You can use Nix as a better docker build, see https://grahamc.com/blog/nix-and-layered-docker-images or https://nixery.dev/.

The dream is using something like Nix to not only reproducibly build a container image but also all of the infrastructure manifests which reference it. I _think_ this is achievable in Nix if you're willing to deal with all of the pain of actually using Nix; however, this would depend on pushing an image to a container registry as part of the Nix build and I'm pretty sure that violates Nix's idioms/conventions? I've certainly never heard of anyone building their entire infrastructure manifests this way.

> The dream is using something like Nix to not only reproducibly build a container image but also all of the infrastructure manifests which reference it. I _think_ this is achievable in Nix if you're willing to deal with all of the pain of actually using Nix;

We did that at an old job. Basically, Nix built images + K8s manifests + a script to push the images. Our CI job boiled down to `nix-build && ./result/push-images && kubectl apply -f ./result/manifests -R`. This is similar to how NixOS' nixos-rebuild boils down to `nix-build && ./result/activate`.

See https://dagger.io, the next gen tool by the creators of docker that does this.

CUE + BuildKit

That's because nix is not a docker alternative.

I'd love a nix-like docker alternative to be fair but that'd be a massive undertaking.

What is a "nix-like docker alternative"? Is that "using Nix to build container images"? Because Nix already does that.

Many orgs get reproducible builds by using different build tools and abstractions. Eg Amazon gets it via their Brazil tool.

I was talking about Nix in particular, but yes, if you’re an enormous and highly lucrative tech company you can pay a team of engineers to build your own reproducible build tool. If the same team is very talented they can probably even get Bazel working. ;) But I don’t think any large orgs at all use Nix, presumably because it doesn’t scale beyond a small number of (enthusiastic) developers.