By managing services I really mean starting/stopping/checking status of/etc daemons. On a systemd distribution, you make a unit file that describes the daemon

By managing services I really mean starting/stopping/checking status of/etc daemons. On a systemd distribution, you make a unit file that describes the daemon and use systemctl to manage it. It seems like sanity for deployment can be accomplished by delivering a template unit file and letting the distro maintainer or sysadmin customize it as required. Networking is a little out of scope here - I'd guess that changing basic network configuration is something that's less frequent than the service management tasks.