systemd does not predate the industry's love affair. According to wikipedia, the initial release was in March 2010. The industry started courting virtualizatio

systemd does not predate the industry's love affair. According to wikipedia, the initial release was in March 2010. The industry started courting virtualization (as it is practiced today) with the appearance of EC2, in August 2006, and the love affair came shortly afterwards. "Reducing boot time" is of great importance for short-lived containers - if it takes 60 seconds to boot a server, and you only run it for 120 seconds, then you have 50% overhead. If it takes 6 seconds, you're down to 5% overhead; If it takes 150ms (e.g. Intel Clear Container project), it's completely negligible. Those scripts, are, in fact, old and fragile, and while they did manage the boot process, "reliable" is a stretch. I've personally filed 2 bugs against the horrible hodge-podge of isc-dhcp that, in rare occasions, randomly failed (which is a bit of a problem if your DHCPd box is unattended and a few hours drive). Through the years, many systems much better than init scripts have been proposed and implemented - personally I like the daemontools family, which I think is inherently better thought out. although it definitely helped to have red hat backing, systemd won on for technical reasons: it's much better than the init scripts; it's not inferior to any other system; and it comes with simple integration with network/resolvers/etc (by virtue of including those services) -- something that saves distributions a lot of work integrating various parts.