We took the same path, using config management tools to automate our deployments. But after a while, we realized that the servers only existed to run apps, and

We took the same path, using config management tools to automate our deployments. But after a while, we realized that the servers only existed to run apps, and those apps could be declaratively described as containers and the whole thing pushed to Kubernetes. That was our 'perfect world'. Reality was different and we still have a lot of servers running stuff, but what we did push into K8s really reduced our operations workload and we're pretty happy about that.