systemd handles service monitoring natively, as well as socket management and many aspects of container management. It's a superset of most of the tools listed.
Right now, I use Upstart (and thus Ubuntu) because it can--kinda-sorta--do the same "supervision-tree" thing that Erlang/OTP does; you can have a virtual "service" that runs a script on startup to get a list of tokens, then starts a set of dynamic children using those tokens ("initctl start myservice/worker FOR=bob", that kind of thing), monitors them, and restarts them when they crash; bringing down the supervisor cleanly shuts down its currently-running dynamic children, and so on.
Can systemd do that? I like everything else I've heard about it, but I haven't seen any documentation regarding this sort of usage.
Funnily enough, last time I set up a supervision tree hierarchy with Upstart, I was thinking the whole time, "this would be so much nicer with Erlang." I think that was my a-ha moment for OTP.
For most standalone systems though, Upstart works nicely enough as long as services don't need too much coordination.
systemd can, right now, launch "template" services based on a common template with a parameter. For instance, the usual set of text login prompts are services named getty@tty1.service, getty@tty2.service, ..., getty@tty6.service, all spawned from a template getty@.service.
systemd is currently adding support for dynamic service "instances", which would allow you to launch and close such services on the fly.
So, depending on how dynamic you need the list of virtual services to be, the answer is either "yes, that works right now" or "yes, that's available in the latest systemd release, but probably not in your distro yet".
I'd love to try systemd in the future but right now we deploy in Debian and for us is easier to go supervisord (and all our devs "speak" Python, that's a plus).
My main concern is that systemd handles too much and I feel it's going to be hard to change. I guess we can start using systemd without removing supervisord and move from there.
