Boot time is a big deal for us. Not sure if it matters, but I don't get paid enough to decide what matters. All I know is we paid extra for some Dell software t

Boot time is a big deal for us. Not sure if it matters, but I don't get paid enough to decide what matters. All I know is we paid extra for some Dell software that lets you fine tune the BIOS and we streamline for boot speed. We're currently in the process of moving anything that can be run on a VM to a VM so this will be even less of a concern in the future and pid 1 will be more of a bottle neck. That said, except for the db servers, we don't run mem checks on boot so our servers are very fast to boot (I believe Dell cites that each Gb of RAM is equal to 1 sec. of boot time when you are running with the mem checker on). The only time I ever do a "deep dive" and manual setup a server is when I have to provision a server for a new department/service. Generally speaking ansible does the work for me and I just hit go on my console and then go get a coffee. So I don't see much of a headache in server provisioning. I also am on the automation side of Ops so I do a lot more work with a already setup server, and in that case, like you said, systemd API is a godsend.