I was going to say the same: I've used clusterssh and similar in the past, but these day I am using Ansible for doing those tasks. Primarily, the task I used i

I was going to say the same: I've used clusterssh and similar in the past, but these day I am using Ansible for doing those tasks. Primarily, the task I used it for was doing OS updates across the fleet. Now I do "ansible-playbook dist-upgrade.yml --tags prod" and it takes care of: - Running on a subset of hosts at a time. - Pinning my own application packages so only the OS packages are updated. - Removing from the load balancer. - Doing the updates. - Adding back into the load balancer. - Waiting for the server to go healthy in the LB. - Unpinning the application packages. I'll say: I use Ansible a lot, so I've become more comfortable with the "using YAML as a programming language", but I don't disagree with you there. It works, and you can become comfortable with it, and it isn't as bad a fit for configuration management as the base statement would make it seem, but there are things that it's a bad fit for. In particular, the looping, especially with notifications.