Well, Ansible is the kind of software which does exactly that and has been created to address this issue from the start. It's an industry standard. You define h

Well, Ansible is the kind of software which does exactly that and has been created to address this issue from the start. It's an industry standard. You define how your environment should be configured in a declarative way, and Ansible connects via SSH to your machines and does the job for you; might work like cron does - running periodic tasks. Surely a very useful tool for everyone who has anything to do with bare-metal machines. You can always go with the Bash / Python scripts, but hey, Ansible is really cool! I'd give it a try even for small things. I use it to get in touch with my home RaspberryPi cluster. The above doesn't make you free from knowing how your operating systems work, BTW! That's a must. Have fun!