Forgive me for using buzzwords, but what's the "cloud native" story on NixOS? Can I easily create containers and update my orchestrator's deployment? Can I abstract things like AWS Lambdas into this immutable build structure?
you can take any nixos configuration and turn it into a cloud image https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators
You can take any nix package and turn it into a docker image https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20720922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18111954
You can even use Nix to create and deploy cloud resources ala Terraform:
github.com/nixos/nixops
Some other notable uses of Nix in cloud native landscape:
https://github.com/saschagrunert/kubernix - a KIND alternative
https://github.com/xtruder/kubenix a Nix DSL for defining and deploying entire kubernetes clusters + deployments (combines nix's docker image building support and deployment support for and end to end cloud-native solution)
I personally think Nix should heavily market itself to the CLoud Native buzzword hype train. as it's my favourite weapon in this space
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 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.
What you can do, though, is use Nix to build a container image with an nginx config. You just can't use the abstractions present in NixOS as-is to generate the nginx config, you'd have to write the nginx config yourself (just as you would if you use a Dockerfile). You could perhaps re-use parts, or modify the NixOS modules, though.