This was a good read. I'm currently designing the deployment tool for GNU Guix (a package manager and distro based on Nix) so I find stories like this very valuable. The author didn't seem crazy about the NixOps state file, which is something I'm trying to think hard about for Guix. They claim that the state file isn't easily shareable across machines. Couldn't they just version control it and clone the repo on every workstation that does deploys or are there complications?