Hi Giacomo and Maxim.

Thank you very much for your replies. I now have a better understanding
of "oci-service-type".

I evaluate the possibility to switch my home server from Fedora to Guix
System. And I try to understand how I can adapt my workflow.


# How I was doing

Until now, I use Podman to deploy and run the services software
separately from the operating system. By service I mean E-mail, website,
chat server, etc. One pod per service. Some service have only one
container, but others have multiple ones.

This workflow give to the services a life cycle separated from the
system. I can upgrade one without touching any other. And I generally
enable the auto-upgrade feature of Podman. If a service stop working, I
can roll back the container to a previous image. But it can be sometimes
difficult to manage when a service rely on multiple containers or when I
cannot found again a container image.

This workflow also allow me to deploy the same stack of containers on
other distributions, like Debian. And, also, to deploy softwares who are
not available on the targeted distribution.

Finally, I can manage everything with Ansible. It give me a sort of
unified "API" on every system where I can run Podman. One Ansible
playbook to install Podman and a private registry, then one Ansible
playbook per service to deploy. So I can re-use what I want on the
server I want. Even if I only have one old computer since more than a
decade.


# What I plan to do

I was thinking of switching from Podman+Ansible to Guix System: One
"operating-system" declaration per service and I can spawn them as a
System Container, a VM or a dedicated server. It will had better
reproductibility, a unified and reusable configuration written in a
functional programming language. And I can deploy a System Container
everywhere I can install and run Guix.

But the System Container management seems to be a bit light for now. So,
plan B is to still deploy the services software with Podman on a Guix
System for now. And I hope, one day, I could contribute to the System
Container management in Guix.

But I still try to figure how I can mix my old workflow and Guix System.

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