The vast majority of people simply redefine the terms to fit whatever they are selling. If your systems are immutable they can run read-only. In the in ninetie

The vast majority of people simply redefine the terms to fit whatever they are selling. If your systems are immutable they can run read-only. In the in nineties Tripwire, the integrity checker, popularized it. You could run it off cdrom. Today immutable infrastructure is VMs/containers that can be ran off a SAN or a pass through file system that is readonly. It means snapshots are completely and immediately replicatable. When you need to deploy, you take a base image/container, install a code onto it, run tests to ensure that it is not broken and replicate it as many times as you need, in a read-only state. This approach also has an interesting property where because system is readonly ( as in exported to the instance read-only/mounted by the instance readonly ) it is extremely difficult to do nasty things to it after a break in - if it is difficult to create files, it is difficult to stage exploits. That's the only kind of infrastructure where configuration management on the instances themselves is not needed