One of the aims of LinuxKit https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit is to show that you absolutely can do without the "doing ubuntu updates" and "writing chef recipes" stuff - you just write a single config file that specifies the whole OS config and the applications you want to run, test on your laptop, build in Ci and then deploy to cloud or bare metal, with just your service (or Docker/K8S for dynamic services).