I know this thread has been going on a while, but can I chime in with something?
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I would like to see more emphasis on Nix/NixOS as a configuration management tool. Many of my coworkers in the last few years have grown to hate Ansible for its wacky non-deterministic behaviour, especially for large deployments. Some have gone back to Puppet. There is an opportunity to present Nix/NixOS as an Ansible/Puppet alternative, rather than as merely a Linux distribution or package manager.
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All of the Kubernetes deployment tools I’ve used have kind of sucked. NixOS’s support for running k8s clusters still needs work, but I see a lot of potential there.
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Though nixpkgs doesn’t include OpenStack currently, it would be the perfect thing to deploy clouds with. The current standard way (from what I’ve seen, at least) of deploying OpenStack is kolla-ansible, which is a frightening mix of Ansible and Docker.
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Some have framed Nix as a competitor to Docker, but they aren’t really in the same space. Additionally, Kubernetes has become the standard way to deploy almost everything. That said, building Docker images with Nix guarantees a higher degree of repeatability than a Dockerfile with Alpine or what-have-you.
TL;DR: Nix’s strengths are as a DevOps tool in this weird little niche where Kubernetes isn’t a good fit. We should highlight that.