[Nix-dev] Nix + software deployment/hosting

[Justin Clayton]

I've been asked to bring my question to this list, so here goes:

We're a software company that has written a customizable framework for
banks to centralize processes surrounding various leasing/lending
operations across the company. It's a Java/XML application that is
hosted as a service in an ASP model. I'm a big CM-centered admin, but
I've never had to work with code in this way so closely until this
job. IMHO the failing of a lot of CM projects is that they were not
developed with portability outside their site in mind. I read the LISA
paper that surrounded deployment of complex interconnected services
like Apache, Twiki, JIRA, etc., and thought that Nix might be exactly
the conceptual line of thinking that we're looking at for our company.
I wanted to know if a) I'm right, and b) if you've heard of this sort
of application for Nix before. Some considerations for our site:

* We need to abstract specific deployment configuration elements
(which do not change from version to version of the code) from the
version-bound configuration elements. The cross-cutting solution that
I read sounds good for that.

* Atomic replacements and rollbacks are key features for us. If we can
avoid restarting a service and creating an interruption for the
customer, we all look very good.

* In addition to web and java servlet servers, our product also relies
on an Oracle database (which resides on its own server), the schema
for which differs across versions. I'd be interested in learning more
about how Nix operates across servers.

Thanks for your interest!

--Justin Clayton