Comment by jcgl

Standardizing that approach is one thing that the systemd project has been working on. They've built various components to help with that, including writing specifications (via the UAPI group) on how that should all fit together.

ParticleOS[0] gives a look at how this can all fit together, in case you want to see some of it in action.

[0] https://github.com/systemd/particleos