Configuration Management Initiative (CMI) in drupal seperates “content” from "configurations". It uses yml files to store the configuration datas and it provides a way for deploying configurations over the sites which includes development, staging and production. Configuration Management Initiative (CMI) comes in drupal 8 as a part of core. In short Configuration Management Initiative (CMI) in Drupal 8 solved a many big issues that a drupal 7 developer experiences. In a fresh Drupal 8 instance navigate to..
admin->configutation-> configuration synchronization
Where you will find three tabs as "Synchronize", "Import" and "Export".
CMI provides “Full Archive” and “Single Item” export and import of the configurations. "Full Archive" will generate a .tar file where that can be imported into the other one. "Single Item" will generate the code for a specific item. For Example - fields, field storage.
Inorder to import "configuration" between sites their UUID must be identical. If you don't have a clonned instance you can change the UUID of the drupal instance. Once you import, it will take you to "Synchronize" tab where you can view the configuration changes.
Note: For the first time after changing UUID, when you are importing using "Full Archive" all the existing fields will be re-created. Since the fields have a mapping to the UUID. Thus you may lose the existing contents in the website. This is not applicable for clonned instance.