I've been working with configuration management for some years now, apart from also working as a developer so I don't believe I'm confusing them as much as I'm admitting that containers make configuration management and deployment easier. I might not have been so eloquent on that point but it's my feeling from using Docker for the past 2 years.

Nowadays all that I do is setup a barebones CoreOS instance and fire away containers at it, be it with kubernetes (and then my config management is a bit more robust so to setup k8s in CoreOS) or just use CoreOS's own fleet if it suffices.

Then I get the goodies of containerization such as process isolation, resource-quotas, etc.

Like I said: it isn't painless, sometimes much the opposite, but it's worked much better for the lifecycle of most of the products and services I've been working on the past couple years.

Even before with automated deployments it wasn't so easy when configuration begins to get hairy. And yes, you can argue that this might be a smell of something else but that's what I've seen happening over and over.