If you have to do a task more than once, automate it!
Quite different approach from Puppet, Chef, CFEngine etc. etc...!
As a system or hosting engineer or whatever normally does is first type in "datacentre automation" in Google and what you get is a lot of commercial companies trying to sell you automation frameworks. Things like Puppet, Chef etc. come along and when you look at their documentation, well, it's huge and takes a lot of time to install and configure properly. Not to mention that you need to install a daemon on every server to get the framework working (imagine trying to do that on 40-50 servers, and imagine if you have like 100-200 servers. So that wasn't actually an option for me at the time of my quest to find an easy framework to automate my tasks.
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With (R)?ex you can manage all your boxes from a central point through the complete process of configuration management and software deployment.
What is (R)?ex
A Simple Framework to Simply Systems Administration
Howto start using (R)?ex
Just enough Perl for Rex
(R)?ex is a server orchestration and configuration management tool. With (R)?ex you can manage all your boxes from a central point through the complete process of configuration management and software deployment.
In short words, Rex is like Make. There is a central Rexfile where you can define tasks. These tasks gets executed on remote machines over ssh. The tasks are written in plain perl.
How To Manage Your Servers With Rex - Best Practice