How do you deploy to systemd? How do you run a container in systemd? Now you need a second and third system, perhaps Ansible and docker-compose, which is simple on the surface but quickly grows in complexity with home made glue to keep all the loose components together.
I agree that for a handful of pet-servers for a team with more existing Linux experience than k8s experience, this is a better starting point, because of the shorter learning curve. Just not kid ourselves that the end product has any less complexity, it's only a different skill set.
systemd-nspawn config, which you put in your aforementioned unit files.
> perhaps Ansible and docker-compose
Definitely don't need docker compose and, in my opinion, don't need Ansible. It's trivial to deploy systemd config and it's trivial to automate.
I'm not kidding myself - the complexity is significantly lower. But it only works if you're deploying to one, or two, machines. This won't make a distributed system and I acknowledge that.
Not to mention I'm only scraping the surface of what systemd can do here. Containers and automating services is just part of it. There's also remoting logging, monitoring and email alerts, periodic health checks.
I agree that for a handful of pet-servers for a team with more existing Linux experience than k8s experience, this is a better starting point, because of the shorter learning curve. Just not kid ourselves that the end product has any less complexity, it's only a different skill set.