Poettering: Factory Reset, Stateless Systems, Reproducible Systems & Verifiable Systems

Stateless, still enjoying use in mainframe and HPC worlds, is hard to do properly. Enterprises have moved to virtualization and templates. There is far more overhead with a virtualized approach, but cpu, disk, and provisioning time are cheap enough. Easier, but not necessarily better.

Large scale deployments and cloud do make the stateless use case more interesting. Overhead is more expensive.

Docker has an interesting approach. Rather than messing with startup on the operating system, Docker discards the entire instance unless it's committed or kept running. Docker processes are "stateless" unless you'd like to commit them.

systemd and Docker have very different responsibilities, of course.