Definitely don't recommend going down this path if you're not already familiar with Nix, but if you are, a strategy that I find works really well is to package your software with Nix, then you can run it easily via systemd but also create super lightweight containers using nix-snapshotter[0] so you don't have to "build" container images if you still want the flexibility of containers. You can then run the containers on Docker or Kubernetes without having to build heavy images.

[0] https://github.com/pdtpartners/nix-snapshotter

I don't recommend getting familiar with Nix because your chances of getting nerd sniped by random HN comments increase exponentially.

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