Guix: Unifying provisioning, deployment, and management in the age of containers

Guix is not only a transactional package manager and declarative GNU/Linux distribution: it's also an environment manager, a container provisioning tool, and more. We will describe these tools and our journey to 1.0, emphasizing key properties that set Guix apart: reproducibility, transparency, and hackability. In this talk I will present GNU Guix, a software deployment toolbox and its associated distro that feature transactional upgrades and rollbacks, declarative OS deployment inspired by Nix, and reproducible builds. I will show how Guix approaches a variety of use cases: "Package management" la apt-get, environment management la VirtualEnv, Ansible-style declarative OS deployment, and container provisioning la Docker. Guix emphasizes programmability and one of its salient features is that it provides a unified Scheme programming environment to deal with with all the aspects of configuration, deployment, and system management-including service management by PID 1. I will illustrate how this works out on standalone Guix systems, and show the benefits of the approach by discussing applications that take advantage of Guix as a library to support reproducible software deployment. Last, I will reflect on the road that led to Guix 1.0 six months ago and present some of the challenges ahead..