[TomFrost]

If the goal is solely Docker images with a standard size in the 20-40MB range, this can be achieved without additional tooling. After switching our development and deployment flow to docker, my team quickly tired of the 200-400MB images that seemed to be accepted as commonplace. We started basing our containers on alpine (essentially, busybox with a package manager) or alpine derivatives, and dropped into that target size immediately. Spinning up 8-10 microservices locally for a full frontend development stack is a shockingly better experience when that involves a 200MB download rather than a 2GB one.

This is in no way a negative commentary on Nix; it looks like an interesting solution to a well-known problem.

[Artemis2]

Same here! Switching to Alpine for most services was essentially painless. To go a step further, the images with binaries that have no dependencies (mostly programs written in Go) use scratch Docker images. This way we get 5MB images, where the size overhead of Docker is nothing.

[_0w8t]

I have found that images with a single executable and perhaps /etc/passwd with no other files prevents to use docker exec as a valuable debugging/poking tool. My preference is to have a single image with all the services and basic tools included and use it to run all the containers on the machine.