What do you do to prepare an Ubuntu droplet for production use

I’m coming from CentOS and I’m curious what other’s in the DO community do to prepare their Ubuntu droplets for production use. This isn’t a hardening question, as I believe I have the security aspects sorted out and this isn’t about initial setup because DO already has a nice tutorial on that.

Some initial observations:

• Ubuntu droplet come with lxd and snap preinstalled and running. If I’m running a dedicated database server I don’t need either of these services and can remove them.
• It appears that Ubuntu is set to automatically install security patches. I don’t want to automatically install anything, I want to do updates during planned maintenance and after they have been tested. I still haven’t figured out how to disable this behavior.
• There are comments about ESM and pro when I log in. If this is a quick script to run some advertising, it’s annoying but I’m not concerned. If there is anything running in the background then I probably want to get rid of it.

Is there some set of common practices that the Ubuntu experts use to remove unnecessary services and increase the stability of a droplet?

I think CentOS 7 was pretty minimal with just necessary services. The linux world has shifted since then and I’m just trying to find the most rebust starting point possible.

Thanks!!