At Senic, we have shifted to systemd for managing many independent application we have running on the Hub. Earlier we were using supervisord and for bunch of reasons(limit dependency, system supported solution etc). systemd provides many strong features, thing like:

uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux control groups, maintains mount and automount points, and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic

We have put together different service files that starts applications as Hub boots. Some of these services have hard dependencies on others, meaning if parent service is not running, child service won't start/run. For example if we have an application which is making network request, in some scenarios it will help if that service is dependent on NetworkManager service which manages Network interfaces(or other native service which handles network connections).

This dependency tree has both benefits and issues. For us, some of the services(parent service), initializes DBus Objects. And child services connects or subscribe to these Objects, that enables DBus communication between separate applications. Now if Parent service dies(SIGTERM), child service can't continue and needs to stop. Here the systemd dependency tree takes care of this for us, it stops all dependent services if parent stops.

But in situation where parent service restarts, I would say, my understanding of systemd fails me. systemd correctly stops all the child services but it doesn't restart them once parent service starts again. I am not sure which dependency construct to use that (Before, After etc) make sure that once parent service restarts, all child process also restart.

All the services have a Restart clause to make sure that service restarts. But restart only happens in some certain scenarios. If a service is stopped using command systemctl stop service-name.service, systemd won't start the service again. And I think this is how child service gets stopped when parent service restarts and hence they don't restart. Maybe.