Admin magazine has an article called Create secure simple containers with the systemd tools Nspawnd and Portabled, which offers a mechanism different from my favorite LXC mechanisms. I'll have to give it a try for simpler projects.
They seem to be subsets of the templates and caching already available via LXC, but the one stand out is an added tool called mkosi, which stands for Make Operating System Image, and is a tool for precisely that: generating an OS tree or image that can be booted. It seems to be useful for creating container images as well as images which can be used in heavier virtualization environments such as KVM.
