I can’t help but feel comparing configuration management to infrastructure orchestration is very apples-to-oranges.
I understand the gist of what you’re saying, but in the real world, comparing apples and oranges is useful. There are many, many people in the world (including the ~100k who read this post) who want to know the trade-offs between Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and so on. The fact that they are configuration management or provisioning tools is actually an important point of comparison and not a reason to discount the comparison entirely!
I agree that these tools can be used together; I even brought up the Docker + Terraform or Packer + Terraform example. Terraform + Ansible is also a reasonable approach. Chef and Puppet, probably less so. Understanding how these tools are different and how they can be combined is precisely the point of this post.
