Oh yes, that’s correct. Nerves builds a firmware image with the system and code that can be uploaded via an Upload script by ./upload.sh lacritch.xyz. Easy as can be. The code for this server is on my GitHub at Cloud Server. I should probably fix the Phoenix signing keys so they’re not in the config.exs but this is a throw-away server so I made it public so you could see it. The whole process is programmable in a few dozen lines of Elixir as well. Bootstrapping the initial VPS image is a little fiddly but not too bad. I used a Knoppix image to write the initial Nerves firmware to a VPS disk and it worked like a charm.
Another note is that I don’t see why one couldn’t take a Nerves firmware image and create a container image by dumping the squashfs filesystem to a tarball. Then you don’t need to worry about library version compatibility since it’s all cross-compiled. 
There’s more discussion on the topic Can you use nerves to deploy a cloud-based server? - #12 by axelson and Running Nerves on Amazon EC2
Honestly, when/if my company needs to deploy web services I’m going to use Nerves images. I don’t see the need for K8s unless you’re doing microservices and I plan to do everything in Elixir. Maybe make a nice LiveView dashboard, insta k8s alternative. 
