How many servers do you have that, when rebooted, need to have their applications started by hand?
I have 3, out of 250. And that’s just because the databases sometimes don’t come up, depending on how the machines went down. When I can restart a server and have everything happen correctly and automatically it saves a lot of my time. Especially if it’s an emergency situation, or 5 AM when I might not be thinking straight.
If I’m responsible for an application I will always rig it to start on boot. If I’m not I’ll always urge the application admin to make their application startup procedure automatic. But hey, if they want to be called at 5 AM to run one or two commands that’s up to them, right?
Yes it is their responsibility.
However, a SysV init script can be quite a lot of work to get robust, if the application isn’t well behaved. Or has multiple versions running. Under different users…