> which essentially means that I'm maintaining a type of registry
Mhm, there's no state that can't be thrown away and recreated, so I'd argue the overhead of running it is much lower than a full-blown registry.
> Why not have a container runtime that, instead of downloading image layers, instead fetches from a Nix binary cache
It depends on where you want to do this - Kubernetes for example has lots of opinions about images and how they're downloaded, so just replacing the runtime wouldn't be enough.
Nixery is an incremental step towards the end-goal, but there's a lot of mindset shifting that needs to happen first I think.
Mhm, there's no state that can't be thrown away and recreated, so I'd argue the overhead of running it is much lower than a full-blown registry.
> Why not have a container runtime that, instead of downloading image layers, instead fetches from a Nix binary cache
It depends on where you want to do this - Kubernetes for example has lots of opinions about images and how they're downloaded, so just replacing the runtime wouldn't be enough.
Nixery is an incremental step towards the end-goal, but there's a lot of mindset shifting that needs to happen first I think.
> Also Nixery is GCE-only
Nope, you can use a disk as the storage backend and then there's no dependency on GCS. S3 support would also be relatively easy to add by just implementing this interface: https://github.com/google/nixery/blob/master/storage/storage...