I suppose so. Nix allows me to run N services on M machines arbitrarily with no virtualization and no overhead.

My team builds a distributed application. We have nix expressions that define packages for all the parts of the application, and systemd services to run them on NixOS. Using those packages:

  • Our production deployment is defined by some Nix expressions that assign the services to different machines in the cluster. 
  • Our staging deployment is a Nix expression that runs all the services on a single machine. 
  • Our development deployment is a Nix expression that creates an environment where all dependencies are available and the application can be executed by hand.

Nix lets you do what Docker does, but at the package level, with no virtualization.