I wouldn't call cgroups "cool" but I would say that it's a better solution than what's offered in /etc/init.d/functions and ancillary tools like /sbin/pidof. In fact I recently had an outage due to a SysV script that on restart managed to killall rsyslogd but then only start the one instance causing an outage for the other instance on the same host. That kind of unnecessary outage is depressingly easy to have, we can do better.