Re: Enterprise Guix Hosting?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Yasu

> Our idea is at the coop is that we want to develop software
> development acceleration tools, and a major part would be
> container-less software provisioning so that composition would not
> mean more and more layers of technical debt...

Don’t discount containers too soon.  Guix has “guix system container”,
which spins up lightweight Guix System containers that share /gnu/store.
You only need to set up a bridge interface on the host and create a
network device pair and move one end into the container’s net namespace.

You can do containers and compose them without layers upon layers of
file system blobs.  The reasons why this is not commonly done on
existing commercial platforms:

- container images are often provided from different origins, so there
  is no trust and thus no way to have them share the same files or
  common packages

- without reproducible builds trust cannot be established

- container images are erroneously considered a requirement for
  isolation, but it is not actually required to use them even in the
  presence of an unshared mount namespace.

Using a shared /gnu/store as a big cache for all containers can be a
real asset.  We can learn lessons from the HPC experience here.

-- 
Ricardo