The Debian-Live approach also provides some good opportunities. First and foremost, the very easy remastering makes it efficient to run with no persistent store quite often. For instance, upon remastering, I just start without the store, and the image I run is union-mounted with the persistence file and copied&compressed. Then I have to boot something else to copy the new squashfs image in place, but that's all that has to be done outside the system.
Boot the new image without persistence, create a new persistence file.
For further adaptations, the new persistence file can be mounted in an instance run under kvm, programs can be added and settings tweaked for an eventual new remastering.
Storing the series of squashfs-compressed images, one can always go back in this process if needed.
Dell PowerEdge R720 Server - 2x8c CPU,256Gb RAM, 128Gb SSD/3x900Gb SAS, Proxmox
$340.00
Dell PowerEdge R620 Server 2x E5-2660 v1 2.2GHz 16 Cores 256GB RAM 2x 300GB HDD
$79.19
Dell PowerEdge R730XD 28 Core Server 2X Xeon E5-2680 V4 H730 128GB RAM No HDD
$389.99
Dell PowerEdge R720XD Xeon E5-2680 V2 2.8GHz 20 Cores 256GB RAM 12x4TB
$510.00
DELL POWEREDGE T430 SERVER W/ DUAL XEON E5-2609 CPU & 16GB MEMORY
$329.00
Dell PowerEdge R620 4-Bay Server 2x Xeon E5-2690 8 Core 2.9GHz 32GB No HDD H710P
$95.63
CTO Dell PowerEdge R630 Server, 2x Xeon E5-2620V4, 64GB- 512GB RAM, 480GB SSDs
$246.67
Dell PowerEdge R440 10-Bay Server | 2x Xeon Gold 6126 12Core CPU, 64GB PC4 RAM
$659.00
DELL PowerEdge R730 Server 2x E5-2690v3 2.6GHz =24 Cores 32GB H730 4xRJ45
$274.00
DELL PowerEdge R630 8SFF Server 2x E5-2690v4 2.6GHz =28 Cores 256GB H730 4xRJ45
$600.00