Slightly tangential but all I could think about while reading this was: Ansible. I switched to it about 6 months back - including for managing e.g. cron jobs an

Slightly tangential but all I could think about while reading this was: Ansible. I switched to it about 6 months back - including for managing e.g. cron jobs and systemd - and I can’t imagine going back to doing any of this by hand. High-level abstraction and jinja2 templating makes this stuff a breeze.