The folks at the Arusha Project are *extremely* caffeinated. The best way to describe this project is that it is a language that defines systems objects. The catch is that it can be specific and useful. You can actually do package management with it.

If you are running Open Source software of any ilk for, say, more than 10 hosts, you might consider checking this project out. One byproduct of this project is detailed descriptions of routine tasks that sysadmins do. That is, even if you don’t use Ark, you could still use the Ark project as a reference for the typical one-off method of building systems. Don’t be doing that long term, though. 🙂