>For me it's solving the problem of simply and reliably wiring up persistent and resilient services (not shipped with the OS).

That aspect was already largely solved, and has been for a long time. runit, upstart, daemontools etc.

Daemontools, like a number of djb's tools, manages to really manage to blend an amazing level of "just works" and "ZOMG, I configure this how?!"

I always hated the prevalence of so many tools -- I get sick of having to learn 30 variants of the same stupid thing because none of them seem to excel in every area. One server from recent memory had crap running in sysv, inittab, and with deamontools because not everybody liked the same system and kinda just did what they knew. I'm rather happy that systemd throws all that out.

That's just lousy technical culture. If you can't ensure you've got clean practices on your servers to that degree, you've got bigger problems on your plate.

As if one is always able to influence a lousy technical culture, especially if they just walked through the door...

Indeed, I've deployed it in both embedded linux and server environments and it works quite nicely in both roles.