I’ve been wanting to tinker with NixOS. I’ve stuck in the stone ages automating VM deployments on my Proxmox cluster using ansible. One line and about 30 minutes (cuda install is a beast) to build a reproducible VM running llama.cpp with llama-swap.
Typically, the container image maintainer will provide environment variables which can override the database connection. This isn’t always the case but usually it’s as simple as updating those and ensuring network access between your containers.
A lot of times it is necessary to build the container oneself, e.g., to fix a bug, satisfy a security requirement, or because the container as-built just isn’t compatible with the environment. So in that case would you contract an expert to rebuild it, host it on a VM, look for a different solution, or something else?
reproducing those installs from scratch + restoring backups would be a single command plus waiting 5 minutes.
Is that with Ansible or your own tooling or something else?
It depends on the container I suppose. There are some that are very difficult to rebuild depending on what’s in it and what it does. Some very complex software can be ran in containers.