I've been searching for tools to simplify system administration tasks that I've been doing using shell/perl scripts for years. I was looking for something allowing me to create receipts and to launch parallel processes over several machines at the same time without much effort.
I have found several tools that match my needs: Capistrano, Webistrano, Puppet, Zenworks, Cfengine, AutomateIt, Bcfg2, Landscape, Func, Smartfrog.
Eventually I've decided to use AutomateIt because:
- It uses a standard language: ruby.
- It's so easy to distribute/group your tasks into projects.
- There are drivers for most unix flavors
- There is no need to start any daemon. It uses ssh.
- It is ideal not only for administration tasks but also for compiling, testing and deployment ones
Visit AutomateIt site.
