I’ve been wanting to tinker with NixOS. I’ve stuck in the stone ages automating VM deployments on my Proxmox cluster using ansible. One line and about 30 minutes (cuda install is a beast) to build a reproducible VM running llama.cpp with llama-swap.
A lot of times it is necessary to build the container oneself, e.g., to fix a bug, satisfy a security requirement, or because the container as-built just isn’t compatible with the environment. So in that case would you contract an expert to rebuild it, host it on a VM, look for a different solution, or something else?
reproducing those installs from scratch + restoring backups would be a single command plus waiting 5 minutes.
Is that with Ansible or your own tooling or something else?
It depends on the container I suppose. There are some that are very difficult to rebuild depending on what’s in it and what it does. Some very complex software can be ran in containers.