I think, the only difference between Puppet/Salt/Chef and shell scripts, is that CM tools already have a collection of common building blocks for stuff like "ch

I think, the only difference between Puppet/Salt/Chef and shell scripts, is that CM tools already have a collection of common building blocks for stuff like "check that package uwsgi is installed" or "check that uwsgi config for application 'mywebsite' matches this template", plus dependencies between those blocks (including dependencies on config file templates and automatic reloads on changes). I tried both approaches and can say that I feel that Puppet and Salt actually save a bit of time, by not having to inventing grep/sed/awk invocations to manipulate files. They're a bit more verbose than `scp ./files/nginx.conf $HOST:/etc/nginx/` or `ssh $HOST sed -ie 's/.../.../ file.conf' for most basic stuff, but way less verbose for anything even a bit more complicated. I don't use Docker or Kubernetes, so no idea about those. But I think configuration management tools can save time. But their usefulness is debatable if, say, all you need to deploy is to scp and untar a simple archive then poke init system to spawn or reload a daemon.