Getting started with Salt: a Puppet/Chef alternative built in Python on ZeroMQ
There is also Ansible [1] which is written in Python and connects to servers using SSH (combined with sudo if needed). This means you don't need to install anything on the servers you're managing, since most distributions have Python >= 2.4 included. For more details see the requirements page [2].[1] http://ansible.cc/[2] http://ansible.cc/docs/gettingstarted.html#requirements