Wouldn't it be great if???

Configuration management is one of the most useful site development features in Drupal 8. It makes a site's configuration exportable, importable and manageable in git. Whilst building the configuration management feature, a thought that often occurred was "Wouldn't it be great if you can take an existing set of configuration and install a new site from it?". Every Drupal developer has turned up to a new project and had to learn a different way to build a development site. Do you get the code from github? Download a database from production or some other special location? And is that database sanitised?