Yep. What nix adds is a declarative and reproducible way to build customized OS images to boot into.
replyNix is the best answer to "works on my machine," which is a problem I've seen at pretty much every place I've ever worked.
replyIt's also an answer to caching with /nix/store. I wish more cloud services supported "give me your nixosConfiguration or something similar" instead of providing api to build containers/vms imperatively. Dockerfile and everything that mimics it is my least favorite way to do this.
replyIt’s fairly trivial to map your NixOS config into a VM image: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-image-nixos-rebui...
replyAn alternative is to “infect” a VM running in whatever cloud and convert it into a NixOS VM in-place: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere
In fact, it is a common practice to use the latter to install NixOS on new machines. You start off by booting into a live USB with SSH enabled, then use nixos-anywhere to install NixOS and partition disks via disko. Here is an example I used recently to provision a new gaming desktop:
nix run github:nix-community/nixos-anywhere -- \
--flake .#myhost \
--target-host user@192.168.0.100 \
--generate-hardware-config nixos-generate-config ./hosts/myhost/hardware-configuration.nix
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