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Lennart Poettering's (the guy behind systemd) opinion on how nowadays distribution and packaging systems should be completely remodelled... You might consider this post heretical, absurd or ingenious - so please read at your own risk ;-)

"Razor is an advanced provisioning application which can deploy both bare-metal and virtual systems. It's aimed at solving the problem of how to bring new metal into a state where your existing DevOps/configuration management workflows can take it over. Newly added machines in a Razor deployment will PXE-boot from a special microkernel image, then check in, provide Razor with inventory information, and wait for further instructions. Razor will consult user-created policy rules to choose which preconfigured model to apply to a new node, which will begin to follow the model's directions, giving feedback to Razor as it completes various steps. Models can include a handoff to a configuration management system or to another system capable of controlling the node (such as a vCenter server taking possession of ESX systems)."

"Metal as a Service - MAAS - lets you treat physical servers like virtual machines in the cloud. Rather than having to manage each server individually, MAAS turns your bare metal into an elastic cloud-like resource. What does that mean in practice? Tell MAAS about the machines you want it to manage and it will boot them, check the hardware's okay, and have them waiting for when you need them. You can then pull nodes up, tear them down and redeploy them at will; just as you can with virtual machines in the cloud. When you're ready to deploy a service, MAAS gives Juju the nodes it needs to power that service. It's as simple as that: no need to manually provision, check and, afterwards, clean-up. As your needs change, you can easily scale services up or down. Need more power for your Hadoop cluster for a few hours? Simply tear down one of your Nova compute nodes and redeploy it to Hadoop. When you're done, it's just as easy to give the node back to Nova. MAAS is ideal where you want the flexibility of the cloud, and the hassle-free power of Juju charms, but you need to deploy to bare metal."

Systemd documentation, it is getting more and more popular...