Does anything like this exist?:
- A program to build a bootable Linux image from a config file, like NixOS
- The image is tiny, like Alpine Linux
- Support for x86, Raspberry Pi, DigitalOcean, and EC2
There is a project to build bootable NixOOS images for Raspberry Pi [1], but it produces 2GB+ images. The iteration time to build + copy + boot is about 10 minutes. And the images are too large to easily distribute.
Packer [2] has some of these things, but it has to run on an actual EC2/DigitalOcean VM to produce images for them. That's a lot of extra config, potential for cost overruns from failed VM shutdowns, more secrets to manage, and more ACLs to maintain.
[1] https://github.com/Robertof/nixos-docker-sd-image-builder