See for more details: https://github.com/krallin/tini/issues/8#issuecomment-146135...
b) systemd is the only thing that can start services cleanly and correctly. Every other solution is in various states of brokenness.
I still think that orchestration should live outside containers, whether within one box or several. BTW systemd has some vestiges of container orchestration built in.
OTOH there are other approaches; say, LXD directly assumes an ecosystem of processes within a container, more akin to a VM than to a single chroot-ed / jailed service process.
Those are what I had in mind. Basically cheaper VPS like service but built on Linux container tech instead of full virtualization. Maybe they are less of a rage these days, when fully virtualized KVM/Vmware VPS are so cheap. But about 5 years ago I did run my email server, webserver and database on such a container for $1-1.5$/mo. When I was able to switch to full virtualization at similar price point, I did. But there's nothing weird about runing multiple different processes in a "container" :)
If you're actually doing those things inside one, you're literally doing it wrong
Yes you might have some special cases where some of this is needed but I'd use anything besides systemd