I feel like there is a large gap between shell scripts and Ansible. If we draw a line, you end up with something like this, with each option bringing more powe

I feel like there is a large gap between shell scripts and Ansible. If we draw a line, you end up with something like this, with each option bringing more power, but also complexity with it. Bash/Make => ? => Ansible => Chef/Puppet/Salt => CFEngine There's a big jump in complexity from Bash/Make to Ansible. This is a place where Python or Ruby would make a lot of sense but without all the dsl/yaml/declarative nonsense. A small library of reusable functions would fit in well here, written in a language that isn't fundamentally broken (bash).