Using saltstack, I can identify with XML-like configs and needing to patch an upstream module to add an obscure flag -- but it's worth it! YAML seems less succ

Using saltstack, I can identify with XML-like configs and needing to patch an upstream module to add an obscure flag -- but it's worth it! YAML seems less succinct than bash until you notice that salt allows you to abstract away distro nuances like useradd/adduser, apt-get/yum/pacman, apache2/httpd. Not a silver bullet for portability but allows your code to focus on the what, not the how. Because salt was designed for the distributed remote execution problem domain, it outperforms any solution which just adds another layer over the legacy tools like ssh or rsync. You can patch salt to add that obscure flag, but can you patch ssh to distribute and run your latest bash script on 10,000+ nodes asynchronously? For smaller tasks bash is just fine, but it's great to build your project on tools that you know will scale.