I switched to using Pulumi from NixOps because of the lack of tooling in the Nix ecosystem (also NixOps is frequently broken in all sorts of ways due to not having as large a community). Is there some ideal way to work with it to get it to behave without having to make your own tooling or would you consider my approach to instead create support for Nix in Pulumi (which I have not done as of yet but there are terraform packages so I'm hopeful on the feasibility of this project)?
I think it would be great to have a Pulumi-based Nix deployment stack.
I think Nix/Nixpkgs/NixOS are great, and by far the best way to package applications. But NixOps, I think, is a mistake - it's an over-extension, the technologies behind Nix are perfect and way better than anything else for package management, but merely OK for host management. I actually think Pulumi has some better ideas for this, so it would be cool to use Pulumi to orchestrate deployment of Nix/NixOS stuff.
I think I might agree. I've been experimenting with making NixOps piggyback on terraform providers (https://github.com/NixOS/nixops/issues/1242#issuecomment-607...) in my spare time. I think this is the same mechanism as Pulumi uses now that I'm reading up on it. Perhaps I should create a Nix frontend for Pulumi instead... Interesting.
I used NixOps myself as well. The way it was designed it's more like equivalent of Vagrant, and to me it was only useful to work locally for testing before deploying it properly.
I haven't tried it but perhaps the teraform plugins are more useful for actual deployment. I wish there was some kind of integration with CloudFormation.
