LXC and LXD: a different container story

Rather late to the party here, but I can recommend mmdebstrap as an alternative to debootstrap - it's got a lot more support for customisation and so forth, as well as support for a number of ways to run as non-root. The big feature it touts is support for multiple mirrors, which is nice and all, but not the feature that made me pick it over debootstrap - that was the customisation options.