[jacques_chester]

It's complicated because orchestration is complicated. You're looking at essential complexity that can't be made to go away. What you can do is wrangle the complexity into a repeatable, declarative form. That's what BOSH and other orchestration tools do.

Everything on that terminology page is what has been found, in various systems of various sizes, to be necessary to ensure some semblance of robustness and operability as you scale from a single box to thousands of VMs and containers.

In my dayjob I've written BOSH release and deploy manifests that stand up a virtual machine containing 2 containers. I've used other deploy manifests that start a virtual machine with a small cloud of containers. My employers use BOSH to orchestrate multiple clouds on multiple backends with thousands of VMs.

Running a process inside the box is necessary to be agnostic of the substrate. BOSH can't assume that you'll run everything in Docker, or AWS, or vSphere, or any other such system. You can run heterogenous combinations per your requirements. Again, some people absolutely require that capability.